In a changing India, gender finally does not exist only on the margins of public and political attention. It is now center-stage and we are demanding… - Barkha Dutt

If you’d asked me what it is like to be a woman in this profession 20-30 years ago, I would have said that gender doesn’t matter. But today, gender does matter. At every stage, you have to fight at least four or five times harder, and when you get success, there will be people who will try to punish you for your ambition, professionalism and competence.

When I was in my 20s, I covered the Kargil war from the frontline. I have grown up as the daughter of India’s first woman war correspondent. Before my mother died when I was 13, she would tell me how the newspaper she was working for did not agree to her going to the war front in 1965. So, she would take a couple of days off and go there with a notepad and a pen, and then start sending stories from there. Many years later, when I said that I wanted to cover the war, the organisation I was working for and the military said, “Absolutely not. We cannot have a woman at the war front".