ScoopWallah Life on a Delhi Daily eBook Justine Hardy
Download As PDF : ScoopWallah Life on a Delhi Daily eBook Justine Hardy 
"You are a journalist. You should be writing on one of our great Indian papers, then you will really be starting to understand us."
A chance conversation with her greengrocer about the portrayal of India in the media inspired journalist Justine Hardy to leave London and, following in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling, spend a year working at The Indian Express in New Delhi.
Her new life – with a quirky landlord who turns out to be a former Rajput prince – takes her all over India, from polo matches and the manicured lawns of Assam tea gardens to city slums in Delhi, stumbling across terrorist sentiments, exploring the HIV problem and having an inspiring encounter with the Dalai Lama.
ScoopWallah Life on a Delhi Daily eBook Justine Hardy
A fun, informative read.Product details
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ScoopWallah Life on a Delhi Daily eBook Justine Hardy Reviews
Justine Hardy is a British journalist who decided to take the plunge and work on a Delhi newspaper. Her book covers diverse topics such as a visit to the Dalai Lama, toilets (or the lack-thereof), Slum education, organic farming and polo.
The prose is easy to read, and both funny and sad. This is essentialy a travel book. It won't change your life, but if you have any misconceptions about the Raj still being alive in India, this might cure you. A great book to take on holidays, about ordinary people and how they live int in India today - a world away from western Europe and America.
Scoop-Wallah
Reading Justine Hardy's Scoop-wallah, an alternatively hilarious and pensive account of her hacking days as a features writer for the New Delhi daily the Indian Express for about a year, is to realize that good writing about India keeps coming out regardless of, or perhaps because of, the country's status as "a functioning anarchy," to borrow a famous phrase from Daniel Moynihan, a former U. S. Ambassador to India. Justine Hardy is a clever writer. She does not claim to be writing about all of India. She is writing just about New Delhi. Her portrait of New Delhi has all the anomalies that one expects in such a book. There is a raja's son who has no kingdom to rule and his satrapy in the flophouse where the writer resides. There is a newspaper editor, her boss, who is unable to understand references to April Fool's jokes in spite of his Anglicization. His name, as transliterated in the book is "Sourish," perhaps a version of "Suresh," meaning the god of gods in Sanskrit. Sourish Bhattacharya will consider for publication only such of Hardy's writing as can be considered fictionalized features, not hard news. When Hardy rants about her missing slides, telling him in London a lost or stolen slide fetches up two hundred pounds, he feigns indifference. Then there are the usual gang of culprits charlatan gurus, rickshaw drivers salivating over the experience of driving a white woman to her destination trying hard to catch a glimpse of her white skin in one of their many mirrors, fops who decry colonialism and hold her responsible for all Britain's crimes without taking into account she hadn't even been born when Nehru's somnolent words announced the birth of India on the midnight of August 15, 1947, dreaming social workers who want to show off their good works. Our writer does not fall in love with New Delhi, but she likes it very much, notwithstanding its unsettling attachment to dust and defeat. She tries to fit in. She wears Indian clothes; she tries to learn to speak Hindi. Of course, her attempt to speak the language always identifies her as a foreigner, a fate she tries hard to avoid. Of course, she speaks Hindi only to those who drive her around or make tea for her. Good intentions don't matter. British administrators also learned regional languages just so that they could tell their servants what to do. Not much goes right for her. Indians are notorious for trying to sharpen their English skills on visiting foreigners. They don't want the visitors to speak the local language, partly because they think it is not polished enough. Thus, it is not surprising that Hardy runs into scores of Indians who want to show her that there remains a British presence in India in the form of English remade in the nuances of native languages. English is the language of power. "English is still the currency of the social establishment. The socialites of Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi may swirl their saris and stand proud in their national dress . . ., careful copies of the sartorially patriotic Nehru, but still they speak English. Their feet are silent speakers too, shod in English shoes, black Oxfords to match the aspirations of language."
Much as I enjoyed the book, I am not able to formulate its readableness in anything other than its fictionality. I believe that the book reads like fiction because everything novel that the writer experiences turns into interesting. In her moments when she stops pretending to be amused by New Delhi's transmogrification by globalization Hardy writes passages which indicate that she can indeed free herself from her self-imposed obligation to remain unsettled by her Indian experiences. Hardy turns from being an entertainer into a Blakean observer when she lets her pen rip the calm surface of her humorous meditation and speak of the mimic men and women, living an opulent life style which is more a parody of life in New York or London than one truly free of sexism as exemplified in arranged marriages and dowry extortions. Her Kiplingesque analysis of the horror of AIDS in India, often brought home to well provided-for wives by ambitious, much-traveled entrepreneurial husbands, the government's denial that the disease is widespread, the government doctor's refusal to treat AIDS patients are perhaps the best part of the book.
A fun, informative read.
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