Author: Francois Gautier
Publisher: Har-Anand
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8124107955
Description
This collection of articles represent the story of author's awakening to what feels is the true India, beyond the clichTs and prejudices the West seems to have inherited from colonial times.
India, for a foreign journalist, is a vast, diverse, difficult and often contradictory country. Most foreign correspondents are posted her for three, or a maximum of five years, too little a time to grasp the subtleties of the subcontinent. As a result, western correspondents, however talented and well-meaning they are, often leave with the same opinion with which they had arrived, having meanwhile fled their readers with near identical stories: How Christian are persecuted in India, the rise of the 'dangerous' RSS, the Human Right Abuses of the army in Kashmir, or some side feature on Medha Patkar and the Narmada Dam.
The author considers himself lucky: he came to India he had just turned nineteen, an age where the mind has not yet settled in hard and frozen patterns and was able to discover the country through more than twenty years of reporting from Srinagar to Kanyakumari.
Contents
CHAPTER I
Ayodhya
CHAPTER II
Kashmir : A Dead-End and a Solution
CHAPTER III
The Christians : A Minority in Moral Majority
CHAPTER IV
The Hindus : A Majority in Moral Majority
CHAPTER V
The Indian Media : A Hostile Force
CHAPTER VI
The (Unfriendly) Neighbours in Asia
CHAPTER VII
The West and India
CHAPTER VIII
Examples Not to Follow
CHAPTER IX
The False Gods
CHAPTER X
The Great Indian Myths
CHAPTER XI
The Rot of Bollywood
CHAPTER XII
India : Everything That It should not be
CHAPTER XIII
The Hidden Treasures
CHAPTER XIV
The Renaissance of India
Index