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Inside India’s Red Corridor
Death, Despair & Dreams in Naxal Land
Speakers
The Red Corridor remains one of the most complex and challenging areas in India, marred by Naxal-State conflict, that has been shaping the lives of its residents for over half a century. In the years of reporting from the conflict zone of Bastar, journalist Ashutosh Bhardwaj pieced together The Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country.
In this session, Ashutosh will shed light on his experience in the conflict zone – reporting on the Maoist, the state atrocities, the plight of the Adivasis caught in the civil war and what it means to live through and write about these experiences as a journalist and a bilingual writer. He will talk about deviating from the traditional form of journalistic writing into more creative ones and the crossroads where these forms converge and diverge. The talk will also offer insights into the status of the Hindi media, its role in shaping the Hindi belt polity, and the urgent need to focus on and invest in this media section.
Ashutosh Bhardwaj will be in conversation with Kannada author Vasudhendra followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Speakers
Ashutosh Bhardwaj
Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a bilingual writer who works in several genres, including investigative journalism, conflict zone reporting, fiction, translation and literary criticism. He has served as the Editor with The Wire, Editor-at-large with the Outlook magazine and in different editorial and reporting capacities with The Indian Express.
He extensively reported on the Maoist insurgency in Central Indian forests, lived with the insurgents in their camps for weeks; investigated fake encounter killings and electoral practices; unearthed various scams and covered a range of issues from politics to art and culture.
He received the prestigious ‘Atta Galatta’ award for his book Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country. This book was also published in Hindi, English, Tamil, Kannada and other languages at the Bangalore Literature Festival.
Vasudhendra
Vasudhendra is an Indian author and has been publishing prolifically in Kannada for over twenty years. Short stories and essays are among his largest contributions. “Nammamma Andre Nangishta,” (I like my mother) a collection of personal essays has been among his popular works and has seen twenty one reprints.
Vasudhendra is a recipient of Sahitya Akademy award “Sahitya-Shree” and many more. He has established a publication “Chanda-Pustaka” which he uses for introducing young and new writers in Kannada as well as to publish and market his own writings.
A graduate of NITK, Suratkal and an ‘ME’ from the Indian Institute of Science, he worked for software industry for over twenty years. Vasudendra has also done a professional course in counseling and spends most of his time these days in counseling his clients.
