'London Memoirs'

Chevening South Asia Journalism Programme:

What can I say about London that you don’t already know? Besides being the most visited tourist city in the world with its disrepute monarchy, London indeed has a lot to offer. First of all, its cultural diversity needs to be applauded. Asian restaurants, African shops, Belgian chocolatiers, Parisian fashion are all testimony of its cultural richness that is so starkly visible at every turn.What’s amazing is the seamless merge of history and modernism on every  street. 

To tell you about my scholarship programme-well its after 6 years that the Chevening Scholarship programme has been opened up for Indian journalists. This time around it also opened its doors to journalists from Pakistan. It's a 8 week programme for senior journalists and the central theme of the Course is Good Governance in a Changing World: The Media, Politics and Accountability. The course is different from the previous scholarships in the sense that previous programmes there was fair amount of training on how to write. In this programme we are not being trained to write but being trained for leadership skills and right decision making abilities etc.  We are expected to write an academic paper for the topics we have chosen for our individual projects. 

Its been an interesting three weeks so far with loads of lectures, seminars and study visits to places like the British Library, BBC and Sky News, Oxford and Cantebury, attending seminar's around the central theme. In the first week. we had sessions on the Future of Media. In the second week it was all about Holding the Powerful to Account where we discussed accountability of Media, morality and community, whether the Media is trust worthy. In Britain do people trust newspapers or TV news and surprisingly, BBC scored higher with people trusting the BBC to another newspaper or TV news channels or even the Government. The third week saw some interesting sessions on Social Democracy, Ethics and Values.  We got an insight into the Levenson enquiry of the phone-hacking case. Also it was interesting to note how even organisations like BBC and Sky News have moved into integrated news rooms. 

BBC's headquarters has shifted this month from the histroic Bush house to bigger office building comprising of 8 floors and very large Integrated newsroom where all journalists across, TV, Radio and Online will be sitting together thereby sharing resources. Similarly, Sky News also has an integrated newsroom. Indeed, the integrated newsroom has achieved substantial savings for BBC that helped compensate for declining licence fee income.So has integrated newsroom become need of the hour or is it is just a cost cutting mechanism. a senior official at BBC says its both. While cost is reduced drastically with synergies being drawn from various sections and one journalist doing more than just reporting for TV but also doubles up as a radio correspondent and writes of online etc....and vice versa. Integration has indeed become need of the hour today across the world. Many across the BBC are being taught new skills so that they can work seamlessly across the various platforms of delivering news. 

We are into our Fourth week of the course and its been hectic so far. This week our theme is How Britain sees the World?. As part of this theme there are visits to the Trade Union Congress, The British Parliament, House of Commons and the House of Lords. Week 5 will see us discussing Governance, development and security.  We have been meeting up with some very senior journalists from the BBC and Sky news for instance we had a session with Tim Marshall -the war and foreign correspondent of Sky News, Andrew Whitehead who spent quite a few years covering South Asia based out of Delhi to name a few. 

All in all the scholarship programme is good. Unfortunately we do not have a choice in selecting our placements.   

We are also most fortunate to be also living the most happening place -'Hyde Park'. The 335 acre huge Hyde Park is just 5 minutes away and therefore do not miss out on my morning runs or cycling. The nearest tube stations are Queensway Station and Bayswater station. Just as I am thorough with the Mumbai trains routes here too I have got very comfortable with my daily tube travel and more or less familiar with all the zones and lines on the tube. Tubes or buses or walking is the best way to travel in London. And last but not the least I have been pub and club hopping here and drinking loads of different kinds of beer.

A visit to the British Library: 

A library is a wonderful place, where you can lose yourself in a breathtaking world of science, travel, fiction and more. And I had the opportunity to visit one of the best and biggest libraries of the world-The British Library at St Pancras-Kings Cross in London. Interesting trivia about the St Pancras station in London is that the CST station or the erstwhile Victoria Terminus of Mumbai is an exact replica of the St Pancras Station.

Coming back to the British Library, the library is also the national library of the UK. The library was originally a department of the British Museum and from the mid-19th century occupied the famous circular British Museum Reading Room. It became legally separate in 1973, and by 1997 had moved into its new purpose-built building at St Pancras, London.

Once you are inside you can explore its 14 million books, 9,20,000 journal and newspaper titles, 58 million patents, three million sound recordings, and much more in hundreds of subject areas. It gets a copy of every publication produced in the U.K. and Ireland. Its collection includes over 150 million items, in most known languages, with three million new items added every year, Its sound archive has recordings from 19th-century cylinders, to CD, DVD and MD recordings. It has eight million stamps and other philatelic items. All this is kept on 625 km of shelves! It says that if a visitor reads five items each day, it would take him over 80,000 years to see its entire collection. It also operates the world's largest document delivery service. Its treasures include the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci's notebook and first edition of The Times, from March 18, 1788. In addition it has material over 3,000 years old that include Chinese oracle bones.

Our visit to the British Library was to get an insight into their South Asia Collections which include Asia language printed material, western language printed material, Oriental manuscripts, prints, drawings and photographs. Apart from that we saw the British Raj come to life through the India Office records - a priceless collection of official documentation and private papers related to pre-1947 India. India Office, a department in the British government in London, became the administrator of India in 1858, functionally replacing the East India Company. The collection comprises of 70,000 volumes of official publications and over 1 lakh manuscripts and maps.

We also see a few of the documents, fragile yet legible and beautifully preserved. We are told that great care is taken in keeping these manuscripts the way they are. They are kept in a cool place something like an air conditioned cupboards where it does not get withered. There was a poster for referendum in the North West Frontier Province. A map showing the new boundaries of a partitioned Punjab, a poster from the 1930s calling upon Muslims to join the Congress's freedom struggle, documents recording the earliest calls for redrawing India's boundaries on a 'cultural' basis (outlined by Syed Abdul Latif in 'a federation of cultural zones for India'). We also saw the 'personal report' from Lord Mountbatten to the King and Prime Minister dated 12 June 1947. In this personal report he relates his meeting with Jinnah and Nehru and details grudging acceptance of both to his 3rd June plan of partition. This South Asia collection is certainly priceless for historians, students, film makers, writers

While at the British Library, I also get a fascinating peek into the lives of the earliest Indians in England. Beyond the Frame: India in Britain, 1858-1950 is the outcome of research by Susheila Nasta and her team at the Open University. While, Ranjitsinhji is well known in India and in Britain so are as are Maharaja Duleep Singh, Abdul Karim (who was Queen Victoria’s Indian secretary), Noor Inayat Khan, the wireless operator who was recruited by the Special Operations Executive in 1942 and infiltrated into occupied France and writer Mulk Raj Anand. Infact, it was Anand’s cook book that popularized curry recipes for the British housewives. Today, curries have become Britain’s national dish and Indian restaurants can be found in almost every town.

The exhibition also showcased art and culture. Ram Gopal, the dancer, brought his company to London's Aldwych Theatre in 1939. Chuni Lal Katial was a doctor and politician who moved to London in 1927. In slightly over 10 years, he had become England's first South Asian mayor (Finsbury, 1938). Nasik-born Parsi Christian Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to study law in Oxford (1889-94) and went on to train at a solicitor's firm in London. They are just a few Indians of diverse backgrounds who as early migrants, much before the post WW2 era, enriched Britain's culture, politics, arts, sports, and society.

National Archives of India and ministry of UK have launched the exhibition to celebrate the cultural impact of Indians on Britain. To give this exhibition a wider audience, the British Library has also launched a website and multimedia timeline to bring the history of the Indian presence in Britain. The good news is that this exhibition is currently, on a tour in South India will be on in India till June I was told. The British Library has also launched website for the exhibition. If you are keen you could get more details at the British Council in your city .

Frontline Club 

I started my career in journalism 15 years ago and the one thing I was told within a year of my profession is that I must get a membership to the press Club of Mumbai. And aptly I did so within 2 years.  The Mumbai Press Club is a place where you hobnob with other journalists and have cheap drinks but, my visit to the Frontline Club of London also started by journalists was an eye opener.

The club that opened in 2003 is the London hub for a diverse group of people united by their passion for the best quality journalism. It was founded by surviving members of Frontline News TV, a cooperative of freelance cameramen formed during the chaos of the Romanian revolution in 1989. It specialized in war reporting for television. Vaughan Smith, one of two surviving founders of Frontline News TV, turned the operation into a club, offering a meeting place for those who believe in independent journalism, as well as to honor dead colleagues. It also aims to lobby for better support for the freelance journalistic community. I visited the Frontline Club to attend a roundtable discussion on ‘New Media and Social activism in China’. After the discussion we were treated to some good wine and snacks followed by Dinner. As we walk along the club room it has an interesting display of relics drawn from the history of war reporting since the Crimean war, including the boots of The Times correspondent William Howard Russell. The other cabinets show personal items, some with shell still embedded, that have stopped a bullet and saved a journalist's life. The walls of the Frontline Club display examples of war photography and artwork.
press accreditation, but he disguised as a British Officer and filmed the conflict for two months.
In his much acclaimed documentary Blood and Dust, Smith has captured strong pictures of the suffering of war, the life and death in southern Afganistan. He spent ten days with an American medevac helicopter unit that lifted off US marines and Afgan civilians off the battlefield.Smith has won around  thirty awards and believes television news broadcasters do not give due credits to camerapersons for their sacrifice and hardship. Twice he had a close brush with death in the battlefield. A bullet hit his mobile phone while covering the Serbian action in 1998. A champion of independent journalism, last year he gave refuge to Julian Assange, the founder of
WikiLeaks both at the Frontline Club and at his home at Norwich, outside London when he fought court cases. Assange had been staying at the club for two months. The Frontline Club is home to over 200 talks and screenings a year. With over 40 bloggers covering 30 places and numerous issues, their blogging network is a place for all those wanting a closer look at the issues that they cover.

About Vaughan Smith:

A war correspondent who also doubled up as an independent cameraperson, Vaughan Smith was in the thick of action during wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosova and Afganisthan. Smith’s is the only uncontrolled footage of the 1991 Gulf War. He was denied