MY OWN WITNESS : A NOVEL BY MRINAL PANDE [HARDCOVER]

An irreverent and often hilarious depiction of life amongst the power-mongers and wheeler-dealers of contemporary India, the novel zeros in on the reality behind the glamorous fatade of news reporting.

When Krishna decides to become a journalist, she finds herself at a disadvantage on t3o counts: one, she is not a man, and two, she has chosen to work in a Hindi language news agency. As her uncle Munnoo Chacha put it, this might prevent her from despair for a while, but would ultimately bring ruin.

The boom in the English media in the seventies had catapulted that language and its practitioners in to celebrity status while the vernacular remained in the slush pile of priorities, at least for the new brand of market-savvy owner-managers who controlled the powerful media empire.

My own Witness brings together an unforgettable cast of characters who inhabit the newspaper offices, press clubs and drawing rooms of New Delhi.