Padma Rao Sundarji 

Seasoned New Delhi based journalist Padma Rao Sundarji is well placed to pen “Sri Lanka: The New Country”, a book on post-war Sri Lanka. Having spent many years extensively reporting on Sri Lanka, notwithstanding travel to the war zones and experiencing the political rigmaroles, she is privy to valuable insight seldom found in foreign correspondents. Sundarji, who in her capacity as South Asian Bureau Chief of reputed German news magazine Der Spiegel - among many other publications - has garnered invaluable expertise, tackles her post-war book with unblemished objectivity, while maintaining journalistic integrity and impartiality on a sensitive subject.

Her plethora of experience and knowledge is undeniable, and Sundarji is both eloquent and meticulous in her responses, as she talks to Daily Mirror Life about her book.

What prompted you to write this book?

When I started my career as a reporter and later a foreign correspondent about 28 years ago, I was awestruck by the thorough research and fact-checking practiced by the reputed international media concerns I worked for. I began to discern a dichotomy between the tone, the pitch of reporting on South Asia and that on the rest of the world... Secondly, I experienced the long war, the tsunami and all other current affairs in Sri Lanka first-hand and intensively. I travelled into the war zone, saw the devastation, the destruction, felt the terror. Nobody who did not experience the 'old country' that way, can possibly write about, let alone appreciate the 'New Country': the title of my book on post-war Sri Lanka. It is a combination of all those factors that prompted me to write it.

Give us a brief synopsis of "Sri Lanka: The New Country".

The key message of "Sri Lanka: The New Country" is a forward-looking one. It examines the post-war present, it projects into the future. But I don't offer any lofty advice to Sri Lankans on what to do with their own country, no shrill rhetoric or admonishments. The book is essentially 'travel reportage': I travel through the North and East of Sri Lanka and let you Sri Lankans speak for yourselves. Sri Lanka is a highly literate country, not a chaotic banana republic with a few great beach hotels. It is time the world respected Sri Lanka comprehensively, not selectively.

You are a journalist. Did that affect how you approached writing the book?

It is because I am a journalist that I could distinguish the wheat from the chafe in international reportage all these decades and felt the need to correct it.  And it is because I am a journalist that this book is in the form of reportage, not semi-fiction or fiction. Finally, it is because I am an experienced journalist that I have the skill of the interview: a particularly tough task if you are dealing with a nation that was just emerging from the rubble of a terrible, 3-decade long war and grappling with political solutions.

Your book will be launched in Sri Lanka this July. Tell us a little bit about what you have planned?

It will be an event at the Indian Cultural Centre and released by Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera. There will be a panel discussion thereafter with two distinguished Sri Lankan academics and moderated by a young and bright Sri Lankan journalist. It is because of the immediate and ready generosity of the ICC, Taj Samudra hotel, the India-Sri Lanka Foundation and others that this event could be made possible at all. I spent my own money researching this book and work as a freelancer now, so I am pretty broke. Minister Samaraweera too, generously agreed to launch it, despite his gruelling schedule. To me, this readiness was a sign and a confirmation of the fact that both India and Sri Lanka believe in a free media, free thought and not in intellectual straitjackets.

What’s next for you? More books in the pipeline?

I am seriously looking for an opening and avenue to move to Sri Lanka as a senior editor for some years. I would like to help put Sri Lanka on the world map as a dynamic society on the move, not a den of intransigent chauvinists and suppressed, cowering minorities only influenced by the diaspora, as it is made out to be. Finally, I would also like to impart all that I have learned over 30 years in international journalism to young students of the subject at various institutions in both Sri Lanka and India.  And somewhere down the line, I am sure there will be a second book on Sri Lanka. I feel one brewing already.

Interviewed by Rihaab Mowlana