With this year’s deadly border skirmish and martyrdom of soldiers along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh still weighing heavily over every Indian, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Saturday launched a book of veteran journalist and media entrepreneur Prem Prakash who had reported from the ground zero of India-China War in 1962 and had always debunked the Indian romanticism of a brotherly bond with its expansionist communist neighbour.
Reporting India: My Seventy-Year Journey as a Journalist” was released by Jaishankar at Kitaab online book launch event organized by Prabha Khaitan Foundation (PFK) of Kolkata in association with Penguin India.Eminent litterateurs, scholars, book lovers, students and journalists from across the country joined the virtual event for an engaging hour-long session with author Prem Prakash; panelists Sheela Bhatt, Sushant Sareen and Ms Aakriti Periwal of PKF who introduced the session while Venkat Narayan made the concluding remarks.Reflecting on seven decades of journalistic work by Prem Prakash, Minister of External Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said, “Prem Prakash’s book in reality is a celebration of his life. He has been there and done that and shaped our recollection of events and the image of India. He has always been at his detached best.”
“Prem, a great recorder of events and history, has always been at the right place at the right time. His book is an engrossing flow which the young generation of today, less conversant of that past era, must read. India has gained enormously from his work,” he said.Prem Prakash who set up Indian news agency Asian News Network (ANI) in 1971 to provide syndicated multi-media newsfeed to Indian and foreign media houses. ANI was also the first news agency to syndicate video news, said at the launch: “The Chini Hindi bhai bhai slogan was nonsense. India’s views towards the Chinese in the past can be described as a kind of romanticism. We gave up everything on Tibet while the Chinese asserted its sovereignty and went on to capture Tibet.”
We still see the world and India from a western correspondent’s view. I fail to understand why Indian media houses, which make huge profits, fail to depute correspondents in foreign countries and present news from an Indian perspective.”Kitaab is an initiative of Kolkata-based organization Prabha Khaitan Foundation which provides a forum for book launches by connecting intellectuals, book lovers and litterateurs with authors. Eminent authors like Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Sampath, Salman Khurshid, Kunal Basu, Vir Sanghvi, Vikas Jha, Luke Coutinho and others have earlier had book launching sessions at Kitaab.
