Ratnadip Choudhury works as a Principal Correspondent with Tehelka. A young IT professional by training and a journalist by chance, Ratnadip hails from Tripura and has been reporting out of Northeast India for Eight years, as of 2012. He started his career with the Tripura Observer and went on to work with the Northeast Sun, The Northeast Today, News Live, Sahara Time and The Sunday Indian. He has also contributed to BBC, CNN, NatGeo TV, NDTV, CNN-IBN and TIMES NOW. Before joining Tehelka, Ratnadip worked with the national bureau of the television news channel NewsX. He specializes in conflict reporting and has a keen interest in India’s eastern neighbours. He is based in Guwahati.
It was in 2006-2007 that New Delhi started aggressively planning to reopen old road, water and sea ways that once used to connect northeast India to Southeast Asia. It was seen as a bold step toward realizing what India calls its ‘Look east policy’. The Centre laid stress on opening [...]
Only last week Assam was celebrating Magh Bihu. In the chilly winters, people gathered in groups around bonfire and chatted. Keep your ears on any of these chats and one topic re-emerges — Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s controversial statements and flip-flops that have been doing the rounds. In the aftermath [...]
July 9, 2012 will remain a black evening in Assam’s history, when on the busy Guwahati-Shillong road in the heart of Guwahati – the gateway to Northeast India, a girl was chased, beaten, molested and traumatised by a group of 20 odd men in full public view with TV news [...]
Two days ago, a 12-member parliamentary delegation from Bangladesh was in Guwahati, the main city of the Northeast on an official visit. The media went chasing them on their views on cross border illegal migration into Assam from Bangladesh. Illegal migration has become the buzz in Assam once again in [...]
The Left Front, which even few years back was a king-maker in Indian politics, is reduced to a shadow of itself. Its citadel, West Bengal, is gone, and so are its power corridors in Kerala. The only state that the Left rules now is Tripura, the smallest of the eight Northeastern [...]
It is said that Meghalaya has a history of no less than 80 years of unregulated and unscientific mining of natural resources, mostly coal and limestone. Due to customary tribal laws and lack of resistance, unregulated mining has turned into a cottage industry of sorts in the hilly state. In [...]
The headline of this blogpost is something that eats away at me whenever I come across an incident of a poor child being sexually abused. I get a somewhat negative vibe from such stories and try avoiding writing on them as a reporter, but I guess a reporter is not [...]
A few days back, I was traveling to the flood affected areas of upper Assam when I got an unexpected call from an old college mate – Shubham Chakraborty, a rural banker. An MBA graduate, Shubham had chosen to tread on a path which many youngsters today would rather not. [...]
In August 2011, we at Tehelka decided to do a ground zero story from Majuli, a river-island floating on the mighty Brahmaputra in Jorhat district of Assam. It is famed for its rich cultural heritage. It is one of the largest fresh water islands where human beings live, but over [...]
Language media in Assam is going gaga about wide spread protests against illegal migrants. All Assam Students Union (AASU) that spearheaded the Assam Movement in 1980s, is leading the fresh outrage asking the government to identify and deport illegal Bangladeshis. The agitation, frenzy and fear of Bangladeshi takeover has spread [...]
Northeast India is now in the nation’s mind space. The violence in lower Assam. The exodus of people of Northeast origin from Hyderabad and Bangalore. A looming refugee crisis and knee jerk anti-foreigners drive in Manipur. All these have kept the region busy. It seems that MC Mary Kom’s Olympic [...]
