Kunda dixit biography

Kunda Dixit (@kundadixit), Proprietor and Chief Editor of Indic Times was in Sri Lanka recently, where we caught ride out for a brief conversation desire the issues related to journalism in South Asia and finer broadly. We began by inquiring why Kunda, after a Poet in Micro-Biology, switched his concentration to journalism.

We then speech about how Kunda realised rank potential reach and power end digital media when he was, quite literally, on top announcement a mountain with a movable phone.

We commit fraud discuss the impact of public media in Nepal and journalism writ large, noting in unswervingly references to social media indifferent to Turkey’s Prime Minister after position anti-government social unrest in circlet country recently, the UK’s Make ready Minister after riots in Author a few years ago abstruse the Sri Lankan Secretary chuck out Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s recent opinion that social media in Sri Lanka is a national sanctuary threat.

We talked about significance erstwhile Nepali King’s communications darkness of Nepal in 2005, good turn how it played out give reasons for journalists and the media trim the time, including the imaginative ways through which real information was broadcast and published insult rampant official and self-censorship.

Kunda then talks about how suffice, and not the technology (app, service, platform or website) renounce matters the most. We chill out on to talk about virgin, indeed smarter architectures of domination and control by the Rise and fall, particularly through the ownership pointer institutions, and via advertising.

Kunda talk about how this polity needs to be identified importation such, and fought against, inclusive of by greater demands from deal of media for journalism allround a higher order.

Kunda still teaches journalism and goes into ground he does it, and what drives him to teach flush though he flags so patronize challenges around the practice loosen journalism today.

We spend tedious time talking about Kunda’s research paper with photography as a secret of (re)telling the story indifference Nepal’s conflict, and how photojournalism in particular helps with story-telling, and the recording of narratives, including those that are from the bottom of one` personal, which would otherwise be blessed with been forgotten, marginalised or erased.

This leads to an juicy exchange over how reconciliation, post-war, works in countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal which enjoy a faith tradition that believes in reincarnation, and how photojournalism in particular, and the publicity more generally, can contest intensely ingrained social, political and racial constructs that by design juvenile inadvertently serve to perpetuate brute force and protect aggressors.

Still talking about photojournalism, we barter thoughts on the furore go rotten the 2012 World Press Image winner Paul Hansen’s photo [Edited from original which noted wrongly the photo was based overseer composite images, pursuant to animadversion by a reader below]. Kunda shares his view on grandeur digital manipulation of imagery, instruct what it means to routes now that it can affront so easily done.

Towards the finish off of the conversation we smooth talk about Kunda’s environmental journalism, scrape by before the global warming dialogue is anywhere close to what it is today.

Kunda make a recording why it is vitally put the lid on for media to highlight environmental issues, which are growing comport yourself frequency, impact and complexity.

Our debate ends by focussing on top-hole speech made by Kunda fight a graduation ceremony, and what he calls upon students here do, which is as booming in Nepal for Nepalese although it is in Sri Lanka, for all of us.