Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily - Hardcover

Hardy, Justine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071956140X ISBN 13: 9780719561405

Publisher: John Murray Pubs Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

Mr. Singh, Kashmiri greengrocer to South Kensington, looked Justine Hardy in the eye over a cabbage. 'You are a journalist. You should be writing on one of our great newspapers. Then you will be starting to understand us.' So Justine Hardy goes to work for The Indian Express in New Delhi.
Memories of Kipling's 'seven years' hard' as a reporter in India haunt her as she travels to Assam and finds the shadows of terrorism stalking the tea gardens. Her landlord, an erstwhile Rajput prince with a fondness for exotic fish with frilly tails, offers advice on all things vital, from choosing face-packs to getting a dowry. He rickshaw driver picks his way gently through her inadequate Hindustani as he takes her from the city's slums to the manicured playing fields of the polo set.
Scoop-wallah is an idiosyncratic, funny and sad tale about writing as an outsider on the inside of a country where the newspapers are still printed on hot-metal machines and deadlines are missed because of cows at rush-hour.

About this title

About the Author

Justine Hardy was born and educated in England, trained as a Journalist in Australia, and has worked on newspapers and magazines both there and in India. Hernew book, Goat: A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill, is also to be published by John Murray in 2000. She continues to write for newspapers in America, England and India, and presents on television. She lives in London and India.

From Kirkus Reviews

Vivid impressions of the different India a young British journalist (Ochre Border, not reviewed) discovered while working as a writer for an Indian newspaper. Hardy has written one of those travel books that is more a collection of set pieces than a linear trek to a desired destination. Though she describes her time with the eccentric princely family whose apartment she shared in Delhi, her personal life is consistently upstaged by the stories she covers. An experienced journalist long drawn to India, she was inspired by a remark from her London greengrocer to apply for a job at The Indian Express, one of the country's major dailies. Since she planned to report on the country from the inside, she held out for more substantive assignments when her editor wanted her to cover socialites and celebrities. She goes here to Assam, where tribal natives, seeking independence, wage a reign of terror in the tea gardens; to a remote valley on the Tibetan border where the Dalai Lama taught the local faithful and foreign tourists; and to the Delhi slums, where inspiring former journalist Gautam Vohra has set up education programs and an organic farm project to show villagers they can make a living farming. While researching a series on physical fitness, Hardy both meets a Brahmin pooja practitioner who foretells her future and also realizes that in a country where ``spirituality and religious superstition hang about on every street corner,'' there is no room for cynicism. Although her tone is light and her affection palpable, her stories reveal the depth of her attachment. Like the British women Kipling described, she has been in ``a place so extreme that it sucked away all the smallness that lurked in the Englishness of the English.'' India, warts and all, from a clear-eyed visitor who stayed long enough to learnand still love. (B&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray Pubs Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 071956140X
• ISBN 13: 9780719561405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266