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SAJA Annual Event A Smash Hit

Apoorva Mandavilli

With the magnificent Manhattan skyline as a backdrop against the setting sun, Daljit Dhaliwal, anchor of ITN World News on PBS, addressed some 390 people -- most of them journalists of South Asian origin -- and presented the 1999 South Asian Journalists Association journalism awards on Saturday, June 26.

Dhaliwal, whose show airs on 40 PBS stations across the United States and on the Internet, has received tremendous attention in the past year. The recognition Dhaliwal has received reflects the rising presence of south Asian journalists in the mainstream media in the United States.

She gives international news "an authoritative voice and a human face," said SAJA board member Jyothi Thottam, as she introduced Dhaliwal to the audience. Dhaliwal was recently named one of the '50 most beautiful people in the world' by People magazine. In August, Esquire e is scheduled to profile her as one of the "Women we love". Nevertheless, Thottam said, what is important is that "her legion of fans know that there is substance beneath the style".

Dhaliwal, who said she is unfazed by her sudden popularity, chose to focus on her program and the difficulty of producing a serious international news program for an American audience. "When international news is covered [in the US], it is by and large glossed over," she said. It is therefore even more important, she said, that ITN World News "is providing a service, it's providing serious news, and there's a very, very loyal audience for it."

Her presence may have been at least one reason for the unexpected attendance at the dinner cruise. According to Sreenath Sreenivasan, SAJA co-founder and a professor of journalism at Columbia University, the organization was expecting about 200 guests and had to arrange for a bigger boat to accommodate the final 390 guests. "Looking at the five years since [SAJA began], I'd never have thought that we'd have such a big gathering," he said.

Amrit Kakaria, SAJA board member and journalist since 1964 agreed. "It was very encouraging to see that so many people, whether they are journalists or not, want to associate themselves with a SAJA event," he said. "We could have done with more space and less heat but on the whole, (the evening) was splendid."

Several guests and awardees travelled from afar to attend the event. For SAJA members who are active participants in the organization's email discussion forums, the evening was a way of putting faces to familiar names and meeting other journalists on a social footing.

Photojournalist Seshu Badrinath travels from Seattle each year to attend the event because "[SAJA] is like a support group to me, a peer group that I can depend on," he said. The attendance at this year's event, he said, "shows that we're starting to notice ourselves, that we are capable of producing journalists within our community."

Anjali Arora, a business writer at Newsweek, was happy to meet broadcast journalist Asha Blake. "[Blake] is someone on television and she has done really well and has gone far. It's exciting to me that we're colleagues," Arora said.

Until a year ago, Arora was a student member at SAJA and found that "as a young budding journalist, it was really nice when I was starting out. It's exciting for young journalists to feel that they're part of a community. That's the best thing about SAJA."

For Sreenivasan, the event also serves to recognize the contributions of reporters who report on issues that affect south Asians. "The best part of the evening was what Kim Bolan said," he said, referring to a reporter who won an award for her stories on the Sikh community in Vancouver, despite threats to her personal safety. Bolan's experience "tells us so much about our work and what we do as journalists. It's not as easy as some may think it is," he said.

Arora hopes that in the future, SAJA, as a group, will add to the work that reporters like Bolan do. "[The US edition of] Newsweek hasn't written a word about the India-Pakistan conflict. It will be interesting to see if SAJA will develop any weight, any lobbying power to alter situations like that," she said.

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