Zaffar Iqbal
Regional Reporting, Jammu and Kashmir (Broadcast) NDTV
Zaffar Iqbal was just two years into his job in the Valley when a Terror attack on his newspaper office left the 32-year-old with three bullet injuries. “It took me a long time to live down the nightmare,” he says. But when he joined work after four months, this time at NDTV, Iqbal was determined to look at the brighter side of life in the Valley.
Iqbal came across a group of Kashmiri youth who dreamt of being models and he captured their stories. “For anybody who hasn’t experienced life in the Valley, it’s difficult to understand how even such a simple thing as modelling can be such a big deal. Talking to these youths, some of who were Kashmiri Pandits, was a revelation of sorts. For many of them simply waking up to a world where there was no violence in their everyday life was a culture shock. Modelling for them became far more than a career,” says Iqbal.
—Paromita Chakrabarti
Nilanjana Bose
Uncovering India Invisible (Broadcast)
CNN-IBN
On a story to Guntur, an AIDS afflicted belt in Andhra Pradesh, Nilanjana Bose expected to find helpless orphans. Instead, she found little heroes.
‘‘I found village after village of brave children who were like little soldiers waging their own war. They were not the helpless kids I had imagined. These were little adults who were going out, had taken over as breadwinners, were fending for their grandparents, feeding their sick younger siblings, and taking care of themselves,” says Bose.
All along, she had a burning conviction: not to reveal the identities of the positive children and people she met, while all along performing the harder task of not telling the children that they were, in fact, positive.
One image in Bose’s mind lingers: of a five year old orphan, going out to work as a ragpicker to support her ailing grandmother, an HIV positive sex worker who had lost her legs. As she says: “I am proud of my work, but also very humbled.”
—Neha Sinha
... contd.
