Gautam Bhimani
Sports (Broadcast), ESPN/Star Sports
Gautam Bhimani’s niche in his words, “lies in off-beat stories which capture the different shades of cricket.” Then he talks about the beginning, in December 2003, commentating with Sunil Gavaskar at the Adelaide Oval, made all the more memorable with India’s win.
Then he tells you about the bull elephant at a game park on the South Africa-Botswana border which posed in the background for the camera in November last year. “I quietly finished the shot and jumped into the pool in front. So you see, even elephants pose for TV these days,” he says.
He recounts the time when he faced up to Wasim Akram’s bowling at the nets in Africa. ‘‘He actually hit me during the shoot,” Bhimani says. “And that, as you see, was my Journalism of Courage,” he adds.
—Siddhartha Sarma

Amelia Gentleman
Foreign Correspondent Covering India
International Herald Tribune
Amelia Gentleman’s last posting was in Paris, which is why when she came to India two years ago, Gentleman was a little wary about her new assignment. “I thought I would miss the Parisian culture and the beauty of the city, but when I came here it was very liberating. There’s a sense of energy and dynamism in India right now because of the flourishing economy,” says the foreign correspondent of the International Herald Tribune.
But months into her new job Gentleman sensed that beneath all the optimism, there was a lot that contradicted the upwardly mobile graph of India. “I was working on a series on children, particularly rural children, because I thought it would be interesting to map out the next generation of Indians through the rapid economic growth,” says the 35-year-old. As she travelled all over northern India, she stumbled upon Auraiya district in northern UP. “I discovered there was 0 percent birth registration there over the last decade because of bureaucratic red tape,” she says. “It was a worrying picture about how such a large percentage of these children lived in poverty and there was no statistical result at all of their existence,” she says. Gentleman’s series brought to the fore the plight of kids across India who were forced into labour or were prey to trafickking. “I have two young kids myself and it’s a lovely place to bring them up, but if you look at the broader picture there’s still a fair bit of work that the government needs to do to put things into perspective,” she says.
—Paromita Chakrabarti

... contd.