Chaitanya Kalbag won three journalism awards in his twenties, setting the tone for an eventful reporting career. In 2007, he also won the Bharat Shiromani award for journalism. After more than a decade of reporting across the length and breadth of India, he began a 23-year career with Reuters in 1983, rising to be the editor of the entire Asia-Pacific region, leading 750 text, photo, online, and television journalists in 35 countries, from Afghanistan to New Zealand. He returned to India in 2006 first as Editor-in-Chief of the Hindustan Times and then as Editor of Business Today. Between 2014 and 2019, he wrote popular columns in the Economic Times and Business World.
In his half-century as a journalist, Chaitanya has straddled the epochal pivot to a new and troubled millennium. He has been a witness to mind-bending changes in the speed, forms, volume and quality of news and information that we humans receive. He has travelled from slow typewriters and hot-metal presses, through teleprinters, computers and smartphones to the instantaneous publication of text, pictures and video online and on social media.
In this journey, he has been a deeply curious and engaging chronicler of people, events, economic transformation and history. This website (www.chaitanyakalbag.com) gathers most of his writing starting from the mid-1970s. He hopes you will find his reports interesting, and that you will burrow with him into the back-stories that shaped his reportage.