OUTSTANDING
POLITICAL REPORTING OF THE YEAR 2007
The Hindu Correspondent in China.
In her sensitive and astute reports she has covered a wide field ranging from the political and strategic, to Indo-Chinese relations and a society in transition.
PALLAVI SHANKAR AIYAR is being honored with the Prem Bhatia Award 2007 for Excellence in Political Reporting and Analysis for her consistently insightful reporting from China.
As Chief of The Hindu’s China Bureau, Pallavi Aiyar has given a new life to that distinctly vanishing breed, the Indian foreign correspondent, whose primary responsibility is to report and explain developments in a foreign land from a Indian perspective. Ms. Aiyar has admirably and competently performed her obligation as a Beijing-based Indian correspondent, with almost daily dispatches on China’s transformation from an agrarian society into a near superpower.
Apart from reporting on significant political and strategic developments, and the bilateral ties between India and China, Ms. Aiyar has sent brilliantly written picture-postcards, bringing alive diverse facets of life in China as an ancient civilization trying to come to terms with globalization and its demands, its global status and obligations and pursuit of national prosperity with its costs and infirmities.
Before joining The Hindu, Ms. Aiyar has worked and reported for various news organizations, including The Indian Express, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times of India. To each of her assignment she brought into play an archaeologist’s curiosity, an historian’s search for order and a reporter’s quest for drama. Fluency in written and spoken Mandarin has enabled her to connect with Chinese society with remarkable ease.
Ms. Aiyar’s reports and analyses offer a nuanced and sensitive glimpse of a changing China; a peep different than that available from the official Chinese media or the agenda-driven Western news agencies. She has traveled widely on her vast beat. Her dispatches, among others, on the big dam across Tiger Leaping Gorge, economic success in the Yangtze River Delta, the restive Hui Muslim community and the first Beijing to Lhasa train have been crafted into a fresh narrative with a distinctively Indian tinge.
Ms. Aiyar becomes the youngest recipient of this Prem Bhatia Award because she has demonstrated all the necessary virtues and qualities of an ideal foreign correspondent.
