We didn’t know if we should spend the night at someone’s place or not, and we didn’t know where to stay. We had no information at the time how Covid spread.
#BARKHA DUTT BOOKS FULL#
There was a full lockdown, there were no places to stay, and no dhabas open. Vinod’s job was very important because he was taking us everywhere.
#BARKHA DUTT BOOKS DRIVER#
We were five people: me, editor Tarun Sharma, producer Prashanti Tyagi, camera person Madan Lal, and driver Vinod Verma.
As the first wave struck, we were three months old. In 2019, I became serious about going independent. Mojo Story had just started becoming a journalistic project, though I had registered on YouTube in 2017. Who were the team members that travelled with you? How did the journeys take a toll on your bodies and minds? In 2020, during the first lockdown, you and your team of three at Mojo Story travelled in a Maruti Ertiga around 30,000 kilometres from Delhi to Kerala and north to Ladakh, in order to report on the pandemic. In this interview, Dutt discussed among other things why covering the pandemic was the most significant and dangerous story she, of Kargil war fame, has ever done and why the harrowing and hopeful stories from the pandemic in India have to be faced first, she says, they have to be told. Now, two years later, her book chronicling what she saw, putting it in journalistic perspective, and amplifying the voices of the people she met – families of the dead or diseased, medical professionals, other people directly in the front line of the pandemic, and others – has been released it’s called ‘To Hell and Back’ and has been published by Juggernaut. She covered these stories for her media venture, the online platform Mojo Story. She travelled 30,000 kilometres in the lockdown, across multiple Indian states, to see the havoc the pandemic was wreaking, carrying in its frantic wake stories of death, tragedy, suffering, hope, and recovery. No one is nameless or faceless."īarkha Dutt, one among the journalists who redefined television reportage in India with the arrival of NDTV, and at present a media entrepreneur, counts the Covid pandemic in the country as a period that, in her eyes, redefined journalism, and also herself. "Everybody wanted their story, or the story of somebody they loved, to be told.
Barkha Dutt: "Let people criticise my work, I am open to genuine criticism"
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