Everyday we have a myriad words flung at us in the form of newspaper reports or television coverages. Together they constitute a documentation of the day’s events and link individual citizens not just to events far removed from themselves but to other readers and viewers, helping them understand contemporary realities, form opinions, and take stances. The information society is based on this process, and takes its sustenance from it. In fact, when a “big moment” emerges in contemporary history, it is difficult sometimes to disentangle the event from the media’s narration of it. Often it is the media that creates and sustains the moment and it may not have emerged in the public sphere if it had not, in the first place, been highlighted in print or television reportage.   Noted newspaper editor and commentator B.G. Verghese has put together nine such moments in our recent history which gave rise to what he characterizes as “big stories”—or, if you like, “big stories” which gave rise to “big moments”. He defines these as “certain moments or facets of truth that are larger and more poignant than the ordinary”. His compendium is by no means a comprehensive one, even if we were to accept his general observation that the “new journalism”, that emerged in a post-Emergency India made acutely conscious of the importance of an independent media, displayed a renewed interest in issues of equity and other social concerns.   Several stories that have played a decisive role in the shaping of today’s India do not figure in the list. For instance, the Bhagalpur blindings, which highlighted police brutality and the callous manner in which human rights of ordinary citizens are treated in society, is one conspicuous omission, as is the storming and demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, although the riots it engendered do get a passing mention in Teesta Setalvad’s chapter on the Gujarat riots in this volume.   This is not, however, to detract from Verghese’s commendable effort to cull together reflections on the important developments of the past two decades by the very men and women who reported on them. Take Raajkumar Keswani’s account of the Bhopal disaster. An unknown journalist working for ‘Rajpat’, a local Hindi journal, Keswani had practically foretold the Union Carbide tragedy, long before the poison leak had taken over 22,000 lives on that fatal December night in 1984. Not ...