Book description
For two months prior to the general elections in May 2009 NDTV anchor
and TV reporter Sunetra Choudhary, along with her colleague Naghma
Sahar, clambered onto a bus equipped with some Club Class seating, the
requisite machinery to beam out live from the remotest parts of India,
and a motley crew of cameramen and engineers. Notching up 200 kilometres
a day, she and her colleagues trundled the bylanes and boondocks of
Bharat in search of the elusive Indian voter, and an insight into his
mind. Lurching into villages without electricity in UP, to tribal
settlements in Jharkand, to Baripada in Orissa and Kanchipuram in Tamil
Nadu they beamed out a daily show called the Election Express, that
spoke one on one with the locals and tried to understand the issues that
determined their lives. Part travelogue, part election special, part
candid confessions of an inveterate TV camera-time junkie, this book is
a delightfully frank account of one woman's understanding of why the
country voted as it did; and how obvious it is, once out of the larger
cities that development is the ultimate vote-getter.
