My Own Witness — Mrinal Pande

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. He had no doubt about that. The boom in the English media in the seventies had catapaulted 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 owner-managers 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. This novel 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 facade of news reporting.