The ABC announcement that Barbara Walters, perhaps the most celebrated woman media personality in the world, was no more was shocking. She interviewed more than 700 world leaders including kings, queens, presidents, military veterans, artists, sports persons and what not. Her two-hour talk with White House internee Monica Lewinsky who shook the Bill Clinton administration attracted a record of 70 m television viewers worldwide.
Walters, 93, born in Boston and educated in Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, reigned as America’s woman superstar of television for almost half a century. She was spirited from NBC with an offer of an astounding 5m by the American Broadcasting Corporation now owned by the Disney Studios. She was estimated to be worth of 7 billion at the height of her career.  

Barbara Walters, right, accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy on her visit to India in 1962

She accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy when she came on an official visit to the country in 1962.  Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister then and his daughter and future Prime Minister Indira Gandhi played the hostess for the US First Lady. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbarith was in toe. 
While for Walters, India was just a passing façade, Barbera Crossette, 80, strutted and fretted in India for eight years as chief of New York Times’ South Asia bureau in New Delhi. She travelled the length and breadth of the country, saw the rise and fall of many prime ministers and reported the assassination of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajeev Gandhi. She wrote some best sellers on the ancient and modern civilization that was India and returned to the US to report the American Presidency and the United Nations. 
Born in Philadelphia Crossette is best known for her study India Facing the 21st Century, So Close to Heaven, The Great Hill Stations of Asia and India: Old Civilization in a New World. It  was her acerbic reporting of 1991 assassination of Rajeev Gandhi in the New York Times that won her the George Polk Award for foreign reporting. In 2010 she won the  Shorenstein Prize for her writing on Asia.

 Jawaharlal Nehru and Jacqueline in New Delhi 

She has been a member of the adjunct faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, was a Fulbright teaching fellow at Punjab University in Chandigarh; the 1994 Ferris Visiting Professor on Politics and the Press at Princeton University, and a Knight International Press Fellow in Brazil 2004-2005. 

My own personal association with Ms Crossette is more illuminating. I stumbled on her feature ‘Another India, South’ that she wrote in NYT before leaving the country to take up her new assignment in New York. Of the 28 years (1973-2001) she was with the Times, she served the last seven years as chief of its UN bureau. 

Walters as television’s woman superstar 

She wrote the South India memoir after her maiden venture into the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It was a hurried tour skipping many landmarks as she would have loved to touch. “Sorry I could not make a perfect dream tour as I had wished for a long time. May be I could come again,” she write to me in reply to a request for publishing the South India piece in the 1991 issue of Manorama Year Book of which I was the Coordinating Editor. 

She was delighted that a publication from the South was interested in her. That too in English spoken by most Malayalees. She said “unbelievable” when I told her the Year Book in its many avatars in English, Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali was hovering around a million copies in circulation.

Two hour interview with Monica Lewinsky attracted 70 m viewers

In Times’ lead story on Rajiv Gandhi assassination, datelined Madras, India, Wednesday May 22, 1991, Crossette wrote: 

“Rajiv Gandhi, a former Prime Minister hoping to return to power in elections this week was assassinated in a powerful explosion as he walked toward an election rally on Tuesday night in a small town southwest of Madras. 

“Mr. Gandhi, 46 years old, became the second political martyr in a family dynasty that led India for three generations. His mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was shot to death in October 1984 by Sikh body guards angry at her crackdown on the independence movement in Punjab.”

Crossette supplemented the report with a side story on the gruesome last moments titled “A Blast, and Then the Wailing Started.”

Barbara Crossette, former Bureau Chief of New York Times, Delhi

She won the George Polk Award instituted by the Long Island University in New York for best foreign report on the basis of the story on the assassination and its ramifications on Indian polity. 

Another of her stories, a long interview with Richard Attenborough on his directorial agonies and ecstasies behind the making of the film ‘Gandhi’ attracted international attention. The interview titled “A 20-Year Struggle Puts ‘Gandhi’ on Screen” published on November 28 1982 began: 
“For 20 years, Richard Attenborough has been a man with an obsession: to bring to the screen the life of Mahatma Gandhi - and to prove in the process that there is a place in contemporary cinema for the big biographical film. The hope at last a reality, ''Gandhi,'' more than three hours long and made at a cost of $22 million, opens this week in New Delhi and London, next week in New York at the Ziegfeld..''Gandhi'' is the story of a complex man, a wise and wily politician who manoeuvred India to independence from imperial Britain while living the nonviolent, austere, communal life that was his impossible vision for all Indian society. It is a film that moves chronologically,

 Crossette’s award winning report on Rajiv Gandhi assassination in 1991

episodically, from an unknown young barrister's catalytic collision with racial and cultural bigotry in turn-of-the-century South Africa to the 1948 assassination in a Delhi garden of the man the world had come to know as the Mahatma - the ''Great Soul.''
“The story of Gandhi is also the story of more than half a century in the history of India - vast, tumultuous, squalid, glorious, seductive India. These are stories so close to the national nerve that no Indian feature filmmaker has tried to tell them, and there are many Indians who believe that no foreigner should have been given Indian Government backing - as Mr. Attenborough was - to attempt the task. ''No man can write a real life of Gandhi,'' Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, once wrote, ''unless he is as big as Gandhi.
''Of course it's a cheek, it's an impudence to tell 50, 60, 70 years of history in three hours,'' Mr. Attenborough said recently in one of a series of conversations about the making of ''Gandhi.'' ''And the temptations of filming in India are simply dreadful,'' he said, explaining the deliberation with which he curbed the camera's tendency to linger over the touristic vistas that appear as backdrop at every turn in that physically spectacular country. ''The only kind of epics that work,'' he said, ''are intimate epics.''
Crossette’s love and admiration for her India, her adopted country, is more pronounced in her memoir “There is Another India, South” published in NYT on October 21 1990. Here are some of its vignettes: 

“To the South, Another India”-Crossette’s memoir of her tour.

“Think of India. What does the mind's eye see? The Taj Mahal, the desert fortresses of Rajasthan, the teeming ghats of Varanasi?
“Think again. There is another India, of brooding Dravidian temples, old towns where fresh spices perfume the evening air, tropical beaches, shaded inland waterways and a softer, sweeter way of life. This is South India, the land below the hills called the Vindhyas.
“Most foreign tourists never get this far south, to the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. South Indians will be quick to tell you why they think this is so: the tourism industry, like politics and government, has been long dominated by the Hindi-speaking North.
“This state of affairs won't last long, however. South India is becoming directly accessible to the outside world through international flights to Madras or Trivandrum by Air-India, Air Lanka, British Airways and Singapore Airlines, among others. The Indian South is a land of beginnings. Today around the pleasant, modern city of Bangalore, Indian science and industrial research are heading into the next century. On the Keralan coast, Ernakulam has become the first town in India to be able to declare that virtually all its people are literate and in reasonable health.

Reproduction of South feature in Year Book 1991

“South of Madurai, India comes to an end in the raging surf of Kanyakumari, on the tip of Cape Comorin, where the Bay of Bengal meets the Indian Ocean. It is another place of pilgrimage: on a pile of sea-sprayed rocks offshore, the 19th-century Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, meditated before setting off on his crusade to restore intellectualism and social responsibility to India's major religion. The Vivekananda Memorial, built on the rocks, can be visited by a tricky ferry crossing. However, Kanyakumari - town and rocks - is of more interest for its geographical setting than for its amenities, and can be skipped.
“It doesn't take more than an hour or so driving up the west coast of India from Kanyakumari to begin the Kerala experience. Kerala looks and feels like another country, a tropical setting for a cosmopolitan people who were beneficiaries of an odd trinity: progressive kings, a strong Christian school system and later communist-led governments, all imbued with a high level of social consciousness and regard for the worth of women.

Crossette on ‘Gandhi’; Attenborough and Ben Kingsley with Oscars

“To begin to grasp this odd historical confluence, stop between the cape and Trivandrum, Kerala's low-rise state capital, at Padmanabhapuram, near the town of Nagercoil.
“Padmanabhapuram, now in Tamil Nadu state after a redrawing of political boundaries along linguistic lines, was once the capital of the maharajahs of Travencore, the rulers of what is now Kerala. The small town contains one of their palaces, perhaps India's finest but least visited treasures, in a woodsy setting.
“North of Padmanabhapuram, the road to Trivandrum passes near the beach resort of Kovalam, which India would like to develop into a major tourist area. Kovalam has its fans, but the beaches, and certainly the hotels, of nearby Sri Lanka (a short flight from Trivandrum or Madras) are far better. But the Kerala coast is attractive, with palms dipping over the sand, often shading small white churches that face the sea.
“Trivandrum has a long beach, too, where people walk in the cool evening breezes. But the town itself, a few miles inland, is all bustle. Its bazaars, shops and handicraft centres make the town a good place to shop for South Indian crafts. There are interesting brass pieces for sale - bowls, urns, water jugs, vases, idli steamers (for making soft rice cakes). There are also lungis (sarongs) of the lightest-weight cottons, often trimmed in gold, dance masks, baskets and rugs.

Two of a handful of books that Crossette wrote on Asia

“At Natesans, a good antique shop on Trivandrum's main thoroughfare, Mahatma Gandhi Road, there are usually superior examples of dowry boxes - jewel chests of wood and brass in which brides carried jewels and gold to the in-laws' home. These can be expensive, up to about $150.
“Trivandrum's most frequently visited temple is the Sri Padmanabhaswamy, a shrine to Vishnu whose outer areas are open to non-Hindus. In this serene compound, craftspeople work in the shadow of the tall Dravidian tower. The city also has several small museums and galleries, and a zoo.
A half-day's drive along the coast from Trivandrum north to Cochin, Kerala's old port city, includes the towns of Quilon, Alleppey and, with a small detour, Kottayam. But the gem of this coast is Cochin.
“Kerala's finest spectacles are often stumbled on, and they are mesmerizing. It may be a temple fair and, if you are lucky, one complete with a procession of decorated elephants. Under the dark tropical sky, crowds of women move arm-in-arm with fragrant flowers wound into their hair and hundreds of food carts offer treats. The effect is a kind of magic found nowhere else in this vast country.” This is how she ends her eulogy.