When I have time after work in the afternoons, sometimes I take the metro to the National Press Club in the centre of Delhi, where I can sip chai and listen to conversations.  This compound is more than a place for journalists to get cheap drinks — it’s also a space where tons of organizations host press conferences every day.   Just walking through the building exposes me to a litany of issues I’ve never heard before.

Save the Aravallis.  Justice for Sonam Wangchuk.  End destructive energy projects in Ladakh.  Free all political prisoners. 

It stuns me how one building can sit at the intersection of a thousand hard-fought battles, outraged protests, tearful pleading, rousing speeches and people who have dedicated their lives to one cause coming and going in an undulating sea.

Spending a semester as a journalist in Delhi after being a local reporter in Missouri could not be a more extreme contrast.  My friends and I joke about how if even twenty people gather for an event in Columbia, the press will be there.  Going from slow, small-town world to a national publication in a country five times the size of the U.S. has just blown me away with the size and scale of world issues.  It’s meant a lot of days where I come home crying or emotionally exhausted after interviews with people who have been through so much tragedy and I’m overwhelmed by the responsibility of trying to tell their story well as an outsider. 

Yet I have found my voice here in so many ways.  I find it with the strangers I talk to in mangled Hindi, in the stories I pitch and tell and even the ones that fall through.  With every conversation, I am driven forward by the propelling sense that the work I’m doing matters.  Every environmental justice issue I’ve picked up, every political campaign I’ve filmed, every activist I’ve interviewed — they’ve all inspired me to want to learn more and propelled my vision for an international news scene with its eyes on India. 

I pray that someday the people I’ve witnessed standing at the National Press Club fighting for their rights, voices and dignity can look back at the world and see it listening.  

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: Journalism: Delhi