In the run-up to t

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My first foreign posting was in Beijing, for the Hindu . This was from 2002 to 2009, when the city was remorseless in its embrace of a glass and chrome version of modernity. A steady stream of friends from India used to visit. I d pick them up at the airport and take them by cab down the butter-smooth, six-lane highway that led to the city centre. They would be lost in admiration at the road itself, but also at the discipline of Chinese drivers, their restrained use of the horn and the absence of stray cows. These guys follow rules like robots, a friend once remarked as he stared out of our taxi window, drinking up what to his India-accustomed eyes was the impossible shininess of Beijing.
The tone was somewhere between awe and derision. None of my colleagues in Beijing s foreign press corps ever shared it. Beijing s chaotic traffic was in fact a standard gripe that was much moaned about when we got together for drinks. Journalists rarely agreed on much, but there appeared to be unanimity in the belief that the Chinese were terrible drivers, so pig-headed that they preferred causing intractable traffic jams to simply giving way.
What my colleagues imagined as a normal new car deals driving experience derived from the regimented hush of German autobahns and American freeways. But my friends and I had grown up in India with a different idea of normal: potholed new car deals roads crammed with autorickshaws, bicycles, scooters, lorries, buses and cars, all fighting for space to a cacophony of horns, sputtering engines and the high-pitched warbling of Bollywood movie songs. new car deals In this, and myriad other ways, we couldn t help but see China differently. This difference set me apart from most Western reporters in China, and later in Brussels and Jakarta, where I pursued my rather solitary career as a foreign correspondent: solitary not because foreign correspondents are thin on the ground, though we have become a shrinking tribe; no, solitary because I am Indian.
On moving to Beijing I discovered that I was only the second Indian correspondent covering China. My lone compatriot was a gentleman in the employ of India s state-owned newswire, the Press Trust of India, who had spent a decade new car deals living in the city without managing to learn a word of Chinese, and who rarely left his apartment. This was a time when politicians on both sides of the Himalayas were prone to gabbling about the world dominance that could ensue were the 2.4 billion people of China and India, equal to a third of the world s population, to join hands in a formidable hardware-software partnership. The fact that there were only two Indian journalists in China reporting the emergence of this Chindian behemoth seemed remarkable.
In fact, the absence new car deals of Indian foreign correspondents was, and is, unexceptional. I moved to Brussels, home to the headquarters of the European Union, in 2009, to become the only Indian journalist covering the EU in what was, according to the city authorities, the world s second largest assembly of the foreign press after Washington DC. In a cavernous auditorium inside the European Commission s main office building, the Berlaymont, daily press conferences were simultaneously interpreted into twenty-three languages for nine-hundred-odd accredited journalists. I was the solitary Indian among these scribbling troops, holding my pencil high for the sixth of the world s population I could be said to represent. (To be strictly accurate, another Indian passport holder was there for Kuwait s state news agency). Indonesia, where I moved in 2012, was a similar experience; new car deals in South-East Asia s largest economy I was once again the sole journalist new car deals writing for an Indian publication.
The average salaries new car deals of experienced journalists new car deals in leading newspapers are in the one thousand to two thousand dollars a month range. Paying reporters several times that amount in a foreign country where the cost of living is quite often higher, in addition to expenses related to moving, schools new car deals and housing, makes little financial sense.
But a purely monetary explanation doesn t seem fully adequate in the twenty-first century context of globalizing economies, cheap air travel and the Internet. The years I lived in China were financially flush for the Indian media following a spell of high economic growth and a consequent glut of advertising revenue. Bucking the global trend in the business, newspapers in India were burgeoning. According to a 2011 report in BBC News, in 2005, the total industry was worth $2.64 billion, a figure that shot up to $4.37 billion by 2010.
In the run-up to t