New Delhi: He called me dada; I called him bhai. Co-travellers, we learnt our first – and the most enduring – journalism lessons in the jungles of Bastar. I then worked with the Indian Express, the newspaper that had given me a crucial assignment to travel, report and write from Central India. I had a luxurious cushion of “national media;” he was exposed to the daily risks against which I was largely insulated.

But Mukesh Chandrakar always remained an explorer, whereas I, the unlucky one, had to abandon the jungle. If the foundation of journalism is field reporting, the daily grind in the sun and the soil that leaves your body grimy and the soul tanned, Mukesh epitomised it.

His own life experiences greatly contributed to his understanding of the police-Maoist conflict and the Adivasi life in Dandakaranya. He was born in Basaguda village of Bijapur during the early years of the Naxal insurgency. He lost his father early and was later uprooted from his village in the Salwa Judum violence. His mother, an anganwadi worker, shifted to the Basaguda refugee camp before the family was forced to move to another refugee camp in Avapalli. A decade later, he lost his mother to cancer.

He was, thus, naturally predisposed to be a remarkable chronicler, an outstanding interlocutor of the tragic zone that Bastar is. He worked for........

© The Wire