Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily [Paperback]

Justine Hardy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000

Challenged by a Kashmiri greengrocer in South Kensington, journalist Justine Hardy went to work for The Indian Express in New Delhi. This is an idiosyncratic, funny, and sad tale about writing as an outsider on the inside of a country where the newspapers are still printed on hot-metal machines and deadlines are missed because of cows at rush hour. India's clash of past and present continues to wrong-foot Justine as she tries to get her story in order.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Inspired by Kipling's years as a reporter in India, Hardy (The Ochre Border: A Journey Through the Tibetan Frontierlands) worked for a year as a stringer for the features department of the Indian Express in New Delhi. Although she writes about her jaunts to a tea plantation in terrorist-ridden Assam and to the Spiti valley in the Himalayas to hear the Dalai Lama, her book is mainly a commentary on Delhi in the 1990s, a world quite remote from Kipling's. She explores discos and polo clubs, public urinals, vastu shastra (an Indian Feng Shui), and NGOs' (volunteer organizations) work in the slums. Hardy writes with great charm and wit; her account of her conversations with her landlord, an idiosyncratic former prince, for example, will have readers chortling. A good complement to William Dalrymple's City of Djinns (LJ 12/94), thisi s enthusiastically recommended for all public libraries.
-Ravi Shenoy, Hinsdale P.L., IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

Vivid impressions of the different India a young British journalist (Ochre Border, not reviewed) discovered while working as a writer for an Indian newspaper. Hardy has written one of those travel books that is more a collection of set pieces than a linear trek to a desired destination. Though she describes her time with the eccentric princely family whose apartment she shared in Delhi, her personal life is consistently upstaged by the stories she covers. An experienced journalist long drawn to India, she was inspired by a remark from her London greengrocer to apply for a job at The Indian Express, one of the country's major dailies. Since she planned to report on the country from the inside, she held out for more substantive assignments when her editor wanted her to cover socialites and celebrities. She goes here to Assam, where tribal natives, seeking independence, wage a reign of terror in the tea gardens; to a remote valley on the Tibetan border where the Dalai Lama taught the local faithful and foreign tourists; and to the Delhi slums, where inspiring former journalist Gautam Vohra has set up education programs and an organic farm project to show villagers they can make a living farming. While researching a series on physical fitness, Hardy both meets a Brahmin pooja practitioner who foretells her future and also realizes that in a country where ``spirituality and religious superstition hang about on every street corner,'' there is no room for cynicism. Although her tone is light and her affection palpable, her stories reveal the depth of her attachment. Like the British women Kipling described, she has been in ``a place so extreme that it sucked away all the smallness that lurked in the Englishness of the English.'' India, warts and all, from a clear-eyed visitor who stayed long enough to learnand still love. (B&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: John Murray (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0719561485
• ISBN-13: 978-0719561481
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,402,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Scoopwallah, September 22, 2000

By 

Dinesh Hassan (Wilberforce, Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A postcard of modern India, January 15, 2001

By 

K. Maxwell "katmax1" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily (Paperback)

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.