For 12 years, I was a low paid news-nomad equipped with an eager mind, a thoughtful heart and an adolescent commitment to social change. As a close colleague told me those days, the newspaper I was working for in Chennai was an unparalleled platform for advocating change and my salary, an incentive for public service. I immensely enjoyed those days of journalism and writing - a great learning experience and a journey that taught me what real India was. It was also a journey in which I met thousands of extremely interesting people from across the world whom I wouldn't have met otherwise. They shaped my perspectives, my life and my knowledge. The language I tried to produce was based on scientific evidence and was soaked in reality.
An early encounter I had in this journey was with an emerging health challenge that was spreading fear and panic: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That was in 1991, five years since the virus was detected in India. Since then, I have been travelling with the epidemic, both as a journalist and as a human being. A large number of my friends, women and men, are people living with HIV/AIDS. While some of them died, some of them are living valiant lives. I learned the meaning of resilience and triumph of human spirit from them. I still continue my journey with the epidemic, closely observing the pathways of its spread and its impact on people.
Six years ago, I left journalism and joined the international development sector. It was the beginning of a new learning experience. New skills, new acquaintances and exciting new opportunities. However, a few months ago, I realised I had stopped writing and my instincts and skills have begun to atrophy. The question before me was, whether I go back to the print media or create something of my own.
Luckily, I am living in a world of Google, YouTube and iTunes - a world in which the new unavoidable element we ought to consume to be valid and alive is called bandwidth. It is cheap and universal. So here I am, back to writing. This time, I need to call it blogging. As digital guru Nicholas Negroponte says in his seminal work "Being Digital", when there are bits, why do I need atoms?
Photo credit: G. Pramod Kumar, 2006
2 comments:
the photos are brilliant. as for the text, its like you are talking to me!
another story of celebrities exploiting (making a spectacle of) the hardships and stories of peoples living these tragic realities...to make a buck...but when do they give back? how or should they use their soapbox to draw attention to these plights?...ta, bryn.
BOTSWANA: Diamond companies move in as AIDS takes hold of evicted Bushmen
16 Nov 2006
A new wave of diamond exploration is sweeping the lands of the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana.
A drilling company, TH Drilling, has confirmed it has started operations inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The news comes just four weeks before the release of the Leonardo DiCaprio film Blood Diamond. The Bushmen have appealed to Mr DiCaprio to help them, as they and many outside observers believe they were evicted from their land to make way for future diamond mining.
TH Drilling appears to be operating on behalf of Petra Diamonds, which has also confirmed in a statement that they are starting a large exploration and drilling programme inside the reserve. The company has identified 95 ‘magnetic anomalies’ (possible diamond-bearing rock) in the Gope area – Gope is a former Bushman community.
Petra says that the Gope area is ‘known to host strongly diamondiferous kimberlites’. Kimberlite is the rock in which diamonds are found.
As the diamond companies move in, the Bushmen who inhabited the land for thousands of years are starting to succumb to AIDS and other illnesses. A 29-year-old Gana Bushman woman from the reserve has recently died of AIDS in New Xade resettlement camp. Tumelo Sebelegangwana leaves one child of her own, and two children of her sister, who died earlier of TB.
Veteran human rights defender, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has made a video appeal expressing concern that the Bushmen ‘have been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and placed in resettlement camps under unacceptable living conditions’.
For further information contact Miriam Ross on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or email mr@survival-international.org
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