In the finale episode of Season 1 of the F-Rated Interview, Suneeta takes us through her childhood in the mining town of Mahoba where she went from reading whatever scraps of newspaper she could find to becoming an award-winning journalist with Khabar Lahariya. For Suneeta, crime reporting is a source of great pleasure as she gets to look powerful people in the eye, and ask them questions.
We send people to jail so we don’t have to think about them. What happens in jail, we’d rather not know. Or if we do, it’s through beefy heroes who beat the ‘criminal’ to pulp, preferably in slow motion.
In our third episode, we meet Rupal Oza, a geographer who works with gender and space. In her new book, Semiotics of Rape, published by Zubaan, she talks about the making of the book, the politics of rape, the role of land and caste in cases of rape, and discusses some critical cases that emerged from Haryana in the last decade.
Food has been an issue for most of my life. It has stood like a giant question mark between my relationships, my friendships, outside my home, inside my home.
In November 2021, a group of eleven women found themselves sitting together in a room in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Three of us (Anushi, Ekta and Angarika) had traveled from Bangalore, and the rest from different parts of Madhya Pradesh. There was a nervous energy in the room. “Why do you think we’ve all come here?”
The third episode features Nidhi Suresh who takes us to Lakhimpur and Hathras, and makes visible the violence that takes place on the scene post the crime. She negotiates quid pro quo with local reporters and highlights the importance of slow and quiet questions even (and especially) when hordes of reporters are covering one story.
The second episode features Neetu Singh, who built her career with Gaon Connection, and by consistently challenging the notion that a journalist’s job stops at the report. With tremendous insight into how to work with local structures to get a job done, Neetu Singh reminds us that it all begins – and ends with – details, details, details.
The first episode features Priyanka Dubey, who talks to us about her journey of documenting violence and crime, her inner life and mental landscape after doing this job for the last 14 years, and how she carries grit and poetry to every scene of crime.
Nirantar Radio introduces a new show featuring F-Rated conversations aka, Feminist Rated Conversations. In Season 1 of F Rated Interviews, meet India’s intrepid women crime reporters, on journalism, ethics, gender, conflicts and some thrilling night rides under the sky.
Elina and I have an agree-to-disagree understanding. I propagate that women should be helped in breaking away from commercial sexual exploitation. That breaking away is clearly possible. That commercial sexual exploitation should not be normalised or tolerated if we wish to build a society that cares for its women.
