Barkha Dutt: belief

Transcript context

…Which do you think are the most valuable conversations in India that the West is essentially blind to? I think the West is able to see India only through certain tropes, tropes that it has gathered from newspapers like the one I write for, Washington Post, as well as the New York Times. Some of these narratives that the West understands about India are true, but they are incomplete. Therefore, the West understands India in terms of, let’s say, debates around whether there is equality for religious minorities, whether there is a free press. These are valid questions. Many of them are raised by journalists like myself, but they do not tell the full story of a complex, paradoxical nation, where there are multiple simultaneous truths. Therefore, I think that Indians are sometimes exasperated by the simplistic, reductionist understanding of our very complicated, 1.3 billion-strong nation. If I’m a Westerner, where should I go in Western media to find the relatively better coverage of India? Or is that impossible?…

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