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ShareThese days everybody in Delhi loves an expat. But there was a time, a decade or so ago, when Delhi wasn't the global destination and white women in the diplomatic enclave did not leave their house lest they got some tropical disease.
Those days the internet was called the information superhighway and Delhi was still waiting for its first big mall and first big multiplex. Justine Hardy's Scoopwallah was written during the 1990s, when she came to India and, following the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling (who reported for Lucknow-based The Pioneer) joined the features bureau of the Indian Express.
The book, published now after a gap of a decade, has all the usual suspects. Justine's Delhi has cows on the road with darting autos and belching taxis; friendly autorickshaw-drivers and erstwhile princes; middle-aged women trying to get their daughters married, and more middle-aged women looking for solace in the ashrams of middle-aged god men.
The people Justine talks about come across as caricatures of themselves -- not for lack of clarity in storytelling but mainly on account of the tomes already published by expats on the pains, joys and slums surrounding their Indian experience.
Thankfully, for Justine, most of these accounts have spared the newsroom in their third world contextualisation of India. Her depiction of the life and times of a bustling Delhi daily in the late 1990s is full of journalists coming to grips with a changing news scenario.
She overcomes her initial shock at her editor's disregard for hard politics and burning social issues and does what she's asked to do: stories that talk of the emerging new affluent India where fashion designers and socialites have a demi-god status.
She does her job but is still confused. At the height of election fever in the city, her editor is more interested in fashion shows and film premiers. She also has trouble understanding why her boss would like her to write a 'fun' piece on the tea gardens in Assam when she would rather report on the insurgency eating up the state.
The temptation to define and correctly analyse a third world country in the throes of a social transformation is often too much for an expat journo. Thankfully, the author doesn't probe too deep for the answers. That's probably why there is as much of Justine Hardy in the book as there is of Delhi and the characters it offers.
