Breaking Ground- Journey Into the Media…And Out

The Nehruvian-era of India roused unprecedented hopes and expectations in the country, particularly among the educated classes. Growing up during Donky Ped post-Independ those atmospheric years and starting out professionally in the historic fifties and sixties, Rami Chhabra carved a niche for herself as a pioneering woman' journalist. The book, presented as her professional memoir', takes us deep into a positive life perspective turning into a complex web of disappointments, bewilderments and committed battles-as the times changed, particularly in the last two decades of globalization. Fascinating and passionately narrated, with minute details of events throwing light on the struggle for women's equality and public service communication space, in particular the intersection with sexuality, the book offers a rare insight into other sides of nation-building.

Rami Chhabra (born 1938, Dehra Ismail Khan, NWFP Pre-Partition India) is a veteran media person and social-activist whose life and work represent sustained commitment to women and social-development issues, addressed through multiple roles, Her expertise in public-service communication, population, women and development has been utilised by Government, national/international NGOs/agencies, including World Bank, WHO, UNFP. A graduate (Eng Hons, Miranda House, Delhi University) she has also pursued post-graduate courses in Law and Sociology. Known as a pioneer woman journalist, Rami is amongst the handful who broke into the all-male newspaper-bastions in the late-fifties; anchored regularly on Doordarsan since its inception. She carved independent columnist-space. Hindustan Times (1960-63); The Statesman (1969-1980); The Indian Express (1974-80). "A Feminist Viewpoint (The Indian Express, 1977 80) broke ground-space for women's issues, while her daring entry into Vietnam, after Saigon's collapse, and 2000-kilometre road-odyssey became an internationally-published world-scoop. Post-Emergency, family-planning programme critiques of this 'silent-emergency took her beyond media to leading NGO, Family Planning Foundation (1978-86), spearheading work to depoliticise and re-energise family-planning in the country. Appointed in 1986 as Advisor/Additional Secretary in the Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, she brought a paradigm shift to family welfare communication and a breakthrough on TV with the path-breaking one-minute spots with social messages on 'prime time. The past two decades have witnessed her fearless battle against 'mal-developments in health and public communication arenas; speak for peace on the Subcontinent. Widely-travelled and a well-known public speaker, she was UN Fellow at the historic IWY Conference, Mexico City, 1975; participant, UN Mid-Decade Women and Media Meeting, New York, 1980;official delegate. Women's Decade Conference, Nairobi, 1985, Married, with three children, three grandchildren, she lives in Delhi.

This is not a personal memoir. It is a remembrance of the making of a professional career in post-Independence media. The times and circumstances that helped root it; the outcrop of other careers and interests that blossomed from those initial roots within the media; and, then the spill-out from convictions and insights that eventually, ironically, limited hard-won public space and stamped life differently. As feminist-icon Gloria Steinem first said it memorably: The personal is political.' But equally, the political is inevitably personal-impacting our lives as it does, in varying degrees, collectively and individually. So, though this is not an autobiography in the conventional sense, it cannot help but have strong autobiographical notes. I was privileged to be one of that first generation of Indians who came to adulthood within the first decade of India's Independence. With that automatically came the good fortune to be part of its pioneer generation for whom fascinating yet un-trodden pathways beckoned towards new horizons. We could make the road as we walked. Nettles may have obscured the entry, but also the most unexpected opportunities leapt from behind each bend for any woman who had the grit and tenacity to walk the way.

**Contents and Sample Pages**