Debarati Guha

Debarati Guha’s background

Debarati Guha has been called “the grandma” by her team because she cares about others and tries to understand their worries and problems. She looks forward to every opportunity she has to tell exciting stories of women’s lives and challenges.

For Debarati, personal is political. She looks forward to every opportunity to tell compelling and exciting stories about people’s lives and challenges. For her, these experiences are rooted in their political situations and gender inequality.

She comes from a multiethnic, multilingual family and developed an early interest in different cultures, religions, and politics. A Bengali at heart, she had firsthand experience dealing with the trauma of partition during the liberation war of Bangladesh and witnessed poverty in its crudest form.

It is important for her that people all over the world learn more about the fears and worries of people in Bangladesh and in India. She was born in Kolkata, though her parents are from Bangladesh. So she always considered herself a Bengali more than anything else and as the daughter of an advocate, she developed her fighting spirit and interest in politics from an early age.

She started her journalistic career in 2003 in India and has since covered many South Asian and international political events. Her interviewees include high-ranking South Asian politicians and intellectuals, such as Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Indian writer, diplomat Shashi Tharoor, and world-renowned economist Prof. Amartya Sen. Debarati lives and works in Germany for the Deutsche Welle since 2005.

She completed her Masters and M.Phil. in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University and worked as an Assistant to the Asia Correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in New Delhi. Later she completed a training program in online, radio and television journalism at DW, headed DW’s Bengali Service and is presently the Director of Programs for Asia.