For two months prior to the general elections in May 2009 TV reporter Sunetra Choudhary, along with her colleague Naghma Sahar, clambered onto a bus equipped with some Club Class seating, the requisite machinery to beam out live from the remotest parts of India, and a motley crew of cameramen and engineers.
Notching up 200 kilometres a day, she and her colleagues travelled through Bharat in search of the elusive Indian voter. Lurching into villages without electricity in UP, to tribal settlements in Jharkand, to Baripada in Orissa and Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu they beamed out a daily show called the Election Express.
Part travelogue, part election special, part candid confessions of an inveterate TV camera-time junkie, this book is a delightfully frank account of one woman’s understanding of why the country voted as it did; and how obvious it is, once out of the larger cities, that development is the ultimate vote-getter, even in caste-divided regions like Bihar and UP