My Own Witness

....the underbelly of journalism through the eyes of an insider.' -- Deccan Herald. When Krishna decides to become a journalist she finds herself at a disadvantage on two counts one she is not a man and two she has chosen to work in a Hindi language news agency. As her uncle Munnoo Chacha put it this might prevent her from despair for a while but would ultimately bring ruin. The boom in the English media in the seventies had catapulted that language and its practitioners to celebrity status while the vernaculars remained in the slush pile of priorities at least for the new brand of market-savvy ownermanagers who controlled the powerful media empires. Krishna spends her early years as a journalist stuck in a dark dingy office in the Old Building and watches first angrily and then with disdain and some amusement the antics of the privileged English lot in the fancy New Building. As she climbs the ladder from lowly reporter to the first woman editor of a national daily to the news anchor for one of the country's most popular television channels she is witness to the changing faces of the media and the battles that are fought daily for greater political and financial gains. The casualty in most cases she discovers is the truth. My Own Witness brings together an unforgettable cast of characters who inhabit the newspaper offices press clubs and drawing rooms of New Delhi. An irreverent and often hilarious depiction of life amongst the power-mongers and wheeler-dealers of contemporary India the novel stuns with its truthfulness and its ability to zero in on the reality behind the glamorous façade of news reporting 'As a reviewer who hails from the tribe to which Pande belongs I was engrossed by the book.' – Paranjoy Guha Thakurta Outlook