Dear Young Journalist, Go East. More Specifically, India

Listen up young journalists in West despairing about state of media & your future: India is the most story-filled country on earth, it is what our unchecked future — and present — looks like. Head to India, live here & project the stories to the world outside, any which way.

Not the big daily headlines, but the stories not being reported, stories that are everywhere around you to see, on the streets, in the choking teeeming cities, even behind the closed door, stories anyone will openly tell you, because Indians love nothing else more than to talk.

You want war zones, they’re here. You want to report on climate change catastrophe, it is live for you to see here. You want to know what it is like when the venom of social media descends from ether into real life, it is here. You want to know what post-Trump world looks like, it is here.

Tech reporters you want to report on startups, gig economy & future of tech: come with me to my hometown where food delivery driver from Swiggy begs his customers for money because his family doesn’t have enough money to eat. Come here for pre-digital AND post-digital society.

Everything in India functions as if this is first time anyone has ever created a civilization & figuring it out as they go along. Hard to explain unless you experience it, for instance fly Air India. The stories behind why chaos exists, how it came to be, that is the story of us, the globe.

It is also the most hopeful country on earth, especially now, a dichotomy that won’t be evident unless you spend dedicated time here. With the mass protests against the government and its right-wing agenda, the awakening of India has been amazing to witness over the last month that I spent here, and even more amazing it really is grassroots and distributed, led by the students, women and minorities.

Journalism schools, instead of study-abroad program in London or Italy, send them to India. It will be scary as hell, but it will set your students up to be best storytellers for life.

Lastly most Indian mainstream media is terrible, either report out to global outlets or create your own, with a global outlook. If I were to start a media company here today, it would be business focused as a lens on the new hyper-consumerist culture that has suddenly popped up here, how it is clashing with the old, and why that matters for the globe.

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Rafat Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, the global travel intelligence company: News, Analysis, Research and conferences on online travel, airlines, hotels, tourism, cruises, startups, tech and more. Subscribe to the daily newsletter and you will be a lot smarter about the future of travel, we guarantee it! 

Previously, he was the founder of paidContent, which he sold to Guardian Media Group in 2008.