Speakers
The weirder the world gets, the more it lends itself to journalism; particularly journalism that runs long, in the form of narrative features or books.
This panel discussion brings together Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, and the veteran journalists Aakar Patel and Sharda Ugra, to spend the evening talking shop. They discuss approaches to stories, narrate anecdotes of interviews gone right (and wrong!), recall misbegotten reporting trips, bemoan the state of narrative journalism today, and relish the genuine thrill of being a journalist out in the field.
Global reportage redefined through Indian eyes.
Speakers
Samanth Subramanian
Sharda Ugra
Sharda Ugra spent more than three decades in sports journalism, working with Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day, national daily The Hindu, India Today magazine and ESPNcricinfo and ESPN India. During this time, she has written and spoken about issues around Indian sport at home and abroad in popular and academic publications. She worked with former New Zealand captain John Wright on John Wright’s Indian Summers, his memoirs of his years coaching India, and with Yuvraj Singh on The Test of My Life, an account of his diagnosis and recovery from cancer. She was a fellow of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne in 2013.
Aakar Patel
Aakar Patel, Chair of Amnesty International India, is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books include Why I Write, a translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu non-fiction (Tranquebar, 2014), Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here, a study of majoritarianism in India and Pakistan (Westland, 2020), Price of the Modi Years, a history of India after 2014 (Penguin Random House, 2021), The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide on why and how to protest (HarperCollins, 2022) and the novel After Messiah (Vintage, 2023).
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