Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope

by M. Rajshekhar

As the Hungarian thinker Tzvetan Todorov writes, ‘Democracy secretes within itself the very forces that threaten it.’ *

The cost of not doing so, as Steve Wick shows in The Long Night, can be dire.15 The journalist William Shirer lived in Berlin for most of the Second World War but missed the Holocaust. He was not the only one. Even the New York Times, as Laurel Leff describes in Buried by the Times, woke up to the Holocaust only after allied forces discovered the concentration camps.16 Instances like these illustrate the greatest professional risk journalism runs: of missing the largest changes of its time.

An analogy for journalism in today's India