writing with fire
There’s a scene in Writing with Fire where a young journalist called Shyamkali has a little moan about how hard it is for her to make deadlines. The doco film shows us she’s been trained to shoot and edit video on her phone for Khabar Lahariya, India’s only all-female media outlet. Her team has been expanding through social media, chasing clicks on Facebook and YouTube with hard-hitting local news. They’re pissing off people in power, even though they were born with none: as women of the Dalit caste, they are considered untouchable by many Indians.
It’s extraordinary that Shyamkali has a voice at all – let alone a platform for her stories – but the reason she’s struggling with deadlines is much more basic. Shyamkali lives in
