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Barkha
Dutt, the best-known face of NDTV, has attained iconic status as a
reporter. A role model for the young, her appeal cuts across all age
groups. Barkha has pushed the limits of intrepid news reporting far
beyond the conventional. In an exclusive interview to Nirupama
Dutt, Barkha talks of her life and work.
She
has been given the title of Indian Christiane Amanpour for bringing home
war on the television sets. Many are the appellations that young Barkha
Dutt has earned in her career as a reporter and now senior editor with
New Delhi Television, the country’s biggest private TV company. She is
an unmistakable icon for the young. A Miss India 2002 contestant called
out from the stage that among the women who inspired her were
"Winfrey Oprah, Barkha Dutt and Sushmita Sen". Young Barkha
has earned four journalism awards and the
Inlaks Scholarship (1997), which sends six Indians abroad annually for
graduate work. Numerous are the positive
reviews that her reports have been given in Indian print media.
Recently, bubbly Bollywood actress Preity Zinta donned the Barkha Dutt
look with cropped hair and no make-up except for kajal as she
played Romila Dutta, a war reporter, in Lakshya. All this would
be enough to turn any head, young or old. But not Barkha’s for she is
a young professional woman with a sensible head on her shoulders.
Meeting Barkha, one thinks she is indeed her mother’s daughter. Her
mother’s story of war reporting begins years before Barkha was born.
At the time of the Indo-Pak war in 1965, Prabha Behl, a bright young
reporter with the Hindustan Times, sought permission to cover the
war for her newspaper. Those were the subdued sixties and women were
still struggling hard to make a place for themselves in a man’s world.
The editor said a firm "No" to Prabha. "We don’t send
women reporters to the war front." But Prabha was a competent
reporter and she found a way out for herself. She took leave from office
and went to stay with her grandparents in Amritsar. Recounting this,
Barkha says: "There, she made contacts and went to the front on her
own. She started sending news dispatches from there. And these were so
good that the newspaper had no choice but to use them." There is
pride in the daughter’s voice as she tells this. Did she inherit the
gift of newsgathering from her mother, who rose up to be Chief Reporter
of Hindustan Times and died young because of a brain haemorrhage?
Barkha is prompt to reply: "Not just my mother but that whole
generation of pioneering women journalists paved the way for us. They,
in fact, were the ones who struggled more and broke the glass ceiling
for us. My mother’s office had refused to send her to the front. I may
have been a novelty as the first woman journalist on air from the action
in the field but I had the support of my office to be there."
Recalling her childhood, she remembers her mother always busy and
leading an adventurous life. "It was exciting but also scary at
times because she would get threatening telephone calls. I remember some
of her stories. She had interviewed Billa-Ranga, terrifying criminals,
in Tihar Jail. She had broken the stories of beef tallow being used in
vanaspati and leakage of MBBS papers," Barkha recollects, adding
that news reporting is a consuming profession and her own mother died at
her prime in 1984, when Barkha was only 13. Coming to the subject of
reporting, one moves to the slightly uncomfortable zone when the
liberals blamed Barkha for glamorising war on television and whipping up
sentiments. Fully conscious of this criticism, Barkha says: "Yes,
this did come up all too often. I was charged with making the situation
larger than life. But sometimes during war and calamity, the situation
does become larger than life, although I did make best efforts to see
the war through the eyes of young officers in the age group of 21 to 27.
I tried to be impartial but at such times the feeling of nationality
does come into play. When people there are dying for you, one cannot
remain totally objective. But I dwelt also on the misery of war more so
in my widely published and circulated Confessions of a war reporter.
The television medium is also such that one sounds more shrill and loud
because one is going on air live as things are
happening." When asked about her views on marriage, Barkha’s murmurs
a thing or two against the institution of marriage, then adds with a
laugh, "Well, I could say that I have not come across the right
person yet." Well so the Barkha story goes on for there is much yet
to come.
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Flash forward and it
is the Kargil combat of 1999. Perched precariously on a rock against the
white moon gleaming in the deep blue sky, Barkha said on a Friday night Star
News bulletin: "A major and perhaps final Indian military
attack is expected tomorrow." Barkha became a familiar face and the
best-known journalist as she was bringing live action home to the living
rooms. She was also the first Indian woman journalist to be reporting
thus as shells flew past and bullets were being fired. The iconic
stature this dare bestowed upon her could have been a heady cocktail and
someone more vulnerable to success would have been a part of the Capital’s
party circuit with her mug every other day among the Page Three
celebrities. How did she resist it all? To this query, Barkha’s reply
is: "I do not consider myself a celebrity. My work is important and
if it is appreciated, I like it. But I do not let it spill on to my
persona. Perhaps it all has to do with the sensible middle-class
upbringing that my parents gave me." Prabha married an Air-India
executive, S.P. Dutt (known as Speedy among his friends because of his
initials), and Barkha was their firstborn. She was born in 1971, yet
another war year when Bangladesh was liberated. Although a December-born
Sagittarian, her parents named her Barkha. Laughing, Barkha says:
"This is so because my parents just loved the rains, and my sister
who is younger to me, is named Bahar." Perhaps the couple was
harking back to the Lata melody of the sixties — O’ sajana barkha
bahar aayi. Barkha was educated at Modern School in New Delhi and
then she went to St.
Stephen’s for a Bachelor’s degree in English
literature. Barkha had a flare for writing and also dreamt about making
documentary films. So, she did postgraduation in mass communication from
Jamia Milia. "That was the time NDTV was just about starting and I
took up a job with them. News has a way of getting into your very bones.
So, there was no looking back after that," she says. However, she
took two years off from work and got another degree in journalism from
Columbia University, New York. Her sister Bahar is in an altogether
different line. She is a wild life conservationist.
What are the
other interests of this newswoman of substance? Barkha has quite a few.
She is an outdoor girl who likes swimming and of late she has been doing
horse riding too. She had a dream of making documentaries and writing,
"I feel the time for these things will come now when I slow down
and leave spot reporting for the younger lot. I love reading fiction and
read a lot of it. Maybe I will also some day try writing fiction."
She says this with the conviction of one who has done her job well and
would now like to move on and not hold onto what brought her glory. In
Barkha is the courage to re-invent herself. With her celebrity status
there are often attempts by scribes to put her in the society gossip
columns. But once when one reporter called her to find out if there was
more than just friendship with Amir Khan of the Lagaan fame, this
alert newswoman turned around and wanted to know the scribe’s
credentials as a journalist for daring to put such a question to her.
Atta girl. 