A Reporter’s Diary

For a television journalist, reporting live from the “field” is a dream that he or she enters the industry with. After reporting from the “field” for close to a decade, Akash Banerjee strings together a series of 12 major events which shaped contemporary polity in India in the past decade. In Tales from Shining and Sinking India we are taken from the rough terrains of Naxal-infested Abujhmad to the power corridors of Pakistan’s precarious politics to the restive McLeodganj (known as Little Lhasa) on the eve of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s historic visit to India in 2012.

The book relates those stories which he had extensively covered in his career as a special correspondent with both Headlines Today and Times Now. Banerjee painstakingly puts together minute details of the back story, which viewers miss amid the cacophony which accompanies every big story.

The incredible story of a Koya Commando Kichananda, who is a former Naxal-turned-saviour for the untrained CRPF personnel in the rugged terrains of Dantewada simply takes the cake. Drawing up the image of an agile, motivated, trained Kichananda and pitting him against the “untrained, unaccustomed and unwilling” CRPF jawans, Banerjee exposes the paradoxes that rule jungle warfare and anti-Naxal operations in the country.

He pulls out many experiences from ground zero. The adrenalin rush while reporting on the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the fall of the Communist Citadel in West Bengal and the rise of Mamata Banerjee with the hope of poriborton, the search for YSR when his helicopter disappeared in 2009 and the politics behind the wave of “frenzy deaths” in the aftermath of his death. He also recreates the political uncertainty that gripped Pakistan on the eve of Pervez Musarraf stepping down as President even as he learnt the paradigms of the complexity of Indo-Pak relations after he botched up the details of his visa.

My favourite is the chapter on Tibetans living in exile in Dharamsala. The moving story of the Voice of Tibet, a ragtag shortwave radio station barely surviving on NGO funds, shows how the will to fight against a mighty oppressor can make a small weapon lethal. The radio station, one of the few links that remains between the Tibetans in India and with those in their homeland, is a source of communication on the human rights violations and the Free Tibet Movement, keeping the issue alive despite international apathy.  The accounts of the heroics of Tibetan freedom activist Tenzin Tsundue and his reluctant ideological differences with the Dalai Lama make for both interesting and insightful reading.

What also adds to the richness of the book is the fact that it is interspersed with telling images from Ground Zero in glossy pages. The picture of bare-bodied children playing with cardboard replicas of the Nano car after Tata withdrew the project from Singur tells a story in itself. Similarly, pictures of the the Bihar flood and the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Mumbai add poignancy to the reportage of the tragic events.

However, the book falters at certain places. Some of the chapters like the one on Bengal’s poriborton and the one on 26/11 simply repeat the information which news watchers and readers have already been privy to. And too many details and repetitive phrases make some of the chapters sloppy.

The book is worth a read for all those who are interested in knowing the firsthand account of a field reporter and the hardships that go behind breaking the big stories. At a time when television news has been reduced to primetime debates and hurried piece-to-cameras by reporters, Banerjee’s narration and his interesting anecdotes are refreshing.