Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo, Stories of Others
On 1 December 2014, a friend tagged me in a Facebook post. When I clicked to see what it was about, I froze in horror. It was a post by Interaz – International Azerbaijan Television, a major national television channel broadcasting from Russia, according to the...
Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo
I could never have imagined it. When I took my three-year-old daughter to nursery school one Monday morning, her teacher asked me why there were posts on the internet claiming that I was having “sex with n*****s”. Nor could I have ever imagined that one of my female...
Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo
In my career as a foreign correspondent, I have witnessed the strange psychology of the mob in many conflict zones. I have observed at close range how a mob forms. How a mob can so quickly resort to violence. And how that violence can so easily result in a death or...
Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo
It was a rainy day, I remember it clearly. 18 January 2010, the first time I knew I had been targeted. A United States Homeland Security official called my office to tell me about some wiretaps the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had. A drug cartel kingpin...
Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo
“Journalism is not for good women from reputed families,” said my old-school grandfather, patriarch of a North Indian regressive Brahmin family and a former bureaucrat, in 2003. He was reacting to my announcement to the family, which had never sent any girl to another...
Nov 24, 2021 | #JournalistsToo
You can imagine what it would be like to be an openly gay, progressive, Jewish, female talking head on the conservative Fox News Channel during the dawn of Twitter. And you’d be correct. I can’t think of a single time I went on air without receiving hatemail — both...