I was married, I couldn’t do stuff like that. “Oh you are from India! But he was.
We lost one colleague… he was killed because he worked for us. It’s not that they just can be learnt.
They have to be learnt. So I get this form from the HR department andI fill up the form honestly and send it in. So you come back from a warzone and your friends are complaining about the fact how their maid didn’t turn up, how the teacher on kids’ school is giving them a hard time… your first instinct is, “Get a life! You never asked.” It had honestly never occurred to me that I should tell them. All you need is the desire and ability to take risk the way Bobby has done all his life.
If they had, I would have happily accepted it. I was very fortunate, I was working for As long as I could keep my mouth shut. Things got very, very ugly and I got to meet a lot of unpleasant people, terrorists and insurgents, suicide bombers… I also got to meet a lot of the victims.
I did some but not in a way that I found satisfactory because I didn’t have the technical skills. And I got to see firsthand really serious firefight. Btw, my Iraqi colleagues were doing the same. ... Park51, as the project is called, is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, American Muslims well known for promoting interfaith dialogue.
Even when people realized I was not Iraqi, the fact that I was Indian was a huge advantage. Lots of fighting and shooting going on for 45 minutes. He has also strived for Time Europe and Time Asia and has reported topics as various technology and soccer (like his very famous article about Lionel Messi). It was very intense.
Bipasha, my girlfriend from high school, now my wife, in the meantime, had moved to Calcutta. And I arrived in Baghdad on the day of the statues going down. He said we should have a shared byline.And then Ruben left. Particularly colloquial Iraqi. They were completely unlike any other business because they were young. That’s a burden you carry now.People keep asking me how difficult it must be for me. Within India, it was a hard thing to do, because I already was a business journalist and it is hard to break out of the silos. Meanwhile, I had joined a local college with no attendance issues.
Then there came another stroke of luck named Far Eastern Economic Review. But I got a sense that this is not what I really want to do.
They couldn’t leave. But the fact is that there are a lot of great journalists in India who started their careers around my time. This is going to be a profoundly unsatisfactory answer I am sure, but it happened because I was lucky. The economy had opened up and all these companies were coming in…. I was very fortunate.
I came here to be the deputy international editor but always made sure that every 2-3 months, I managed to get away from my desk responsibilities and go and do stories.Then, the Arab Spring happened. And that’s the sobering thing. A couple of days before the statue came down I snuck back into Iraq, and parked myself in Fallujah for a day, which was not a very safe place. But CNN had heard it and reported it.….Now, she is thinking, “Normally if there is an explosion he calls. He is my guest, he is my friend!” It’s all about cultural conditioning.
What is wrong with you people. I am happy to stay here.” But I had no idea that I would still be there at the end of 2007.I got to see the best and the worst of it. In fact, he was taking advantage of his cultural knowledge. The guy who was their local correspondent, a guy called Ruben Banerji, who later went on to work for India Today, used me as his leg man. They were responsible for me… Many of them had to lie to their friends and family about what they were doing for a living because it was too risky to tell people they were working for an American company.
I am not being self-effacing or anything. My wife and I were able to see each other [on Skype] on weekends…weekends for her.
That’s not a normal way to start a career, I was very fortunate….I worked in Vizag for 2-2.5 years. The hope and expectations that were generated by the fall of Saddam and the incredibly stupid decisions that led to the unraveling of that hope and expectation. Later on, I would go to Saudi, Yemen, UAE…and I realized in the Arab world I feel at home. As an Indian, I had been raised on a diet of propaganda.