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– Ayesha Bhatty

The past year-and-a-half of Ayesha Bhatty’s life has been a whirlwind of travel, writing, and change. In late 2005, the former University of British Columbia (UBC) graduate journalism student spent three months in India reporting on international development issues.

Originally born in New Delhi, India, Bhatty and her family immigrated to Canada in 1995 after spending nine years living in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. She settled in Vancouver, where she began studying for an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Simon Fraser University, which she completed in 2000. Though her career began on a different path, Bhatty says her fascination with journalism has a long history.

“I remember as a kid, when I was about 12, looking at the news anchor on TV and thinking ‘That is the coolest job in the world, but I’ll never be able to do it’ because I thought you had to be good looking, and smart, and funny, and know everything. It was kind of like saying ‘When I’m prime minister, I’ll be a news anchor as well’,” she says.

Business seemed the most “sensible” decision when it was time to choose a career. People and places interested her most, so she chose to concentrate on human resource management, “the most people-oriented kind of business” she could find.

But after a few years of unfulfilling work in the business world, Ayesha Bhatty made a dramatic career move and began a graduate degree in journalism at UBC. Graduating in 2005, she received the UBC/International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Award for International Development Journalism.

The grant allowed Bhatty to return to India to write articles. Her goal was to have her stories published in Canadian media outlets. She was successful: The Ottawa Citizen, The Toronto Star, and the Winnipeg Free Press published her accounts of Canadians’ efforts to fight poverty, spread awareness about HIV/AIDS, and promote women’s rights in India.

But  Bhatty says her time in India wasn’t without difficulties. Canadian newspaper editors stressed the importance of making a “Canadian connection” in any story she wrote, since they thought this would be of more interest to their readers. These were hard to find so far away from home. Her big break came when, with the intervention of a friend’s email, she established a source within the Canadian embassy in New Delhi. That source directed her to many of the individuals featured in her stories.

“Without that email, I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere. I would have had one or two other leads, but not nearly as many as I got from the person at the embassy.”

Her journey took her all over India, from Delhi to cities like Udaipur in the north, Warangal in the centre, and Chennai and Bagalkot in the south. At every stop, she learned something new about the struggles of ordinary people and how Canadians are helping them.

While in Warangal, in Andhra Pradesh state, she met Angèle Gingras, a Canadian who spends six months every year working in India. Originally from Warangal, Gingras is the founder of Bala Vikasa, a women’s social service organization, which has organized 132 000 uneducated women into savings and loans groups. In operation for 10 years, the program has also taught a further 20 000 to read and write.

“I honestly think she [Gingras] is worthy of sainthood for what she has achieved!” Bhatty says. “Most of the people I talked to tended to have common characteristics: some had parents who were socially active, others had deeply held religious beliefs.”

After her travels in India, Bhatty was offered a job with Al-Arabiya, an Arab news organization based in Dubai that competes with the television network Al Jazeera, operating out of Qatar. At Al-Arabiya, Bhatty is responsible for sending breaking news to cell phones as part of Dubai’s burgeoning text messaging market, where people are using text messages for “just about everything,” she says.

As for what she’d like to do in the future,  Ayesha Bhatty says she hopes to return home soon to pursue a journalism career in Canada and be closer to her parents, who live in Toronto. “If I can do something that offers the opportunity to do in-depth interviews with people, like being an anchor on a morning show, with a mix of news, but with some leeway for fun and entertainment, then I think that would be my nirvana.”

 

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