User:Sonalidg/sandbox/Ashis Ray

Ashis Ray is the longest serving Indian foreign correspondent, having worked in this capacity since 1977, broadcasting for BBC, CNN and ITN among other organisations, and writing for the Ananda Bazar Group and The Times of India as well as numerous major British newspapers. He is also the senior-most of the still active broadcasters and writers on cricket, having made his debut as a ball-by-ball commentator in a test match in 1975.

Family background
Ray belongs to the family of Basu Ray Chaudhuris of Ulpur village in Gopalgunj district in Bengal (now in Bangladesh, but which constituted a segment of India before the country was partitioned in 1947). Basu Ray Chaudhuri (a title sometimes given to eminent zamindars or landowners) was shortened to "Ray", an anglicised and shortened version of the name.

Ray's great-great-grandfather Purna Chandra Ray, an advocate, migrated from Ulpur around the mid-19th century to Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in India. Calcutta was Bengal's premier metropolis, the capital of British-ruled India at the time and the second city of the British empire. Purna's son Satish Ray qualified as the first doctorate of law of Kolkata University, one of the first and foremost seats of modern higher studies created during the Raj, before achieving significant success in his profession at the Calcutta High Court.

Uncommonly for a non-Briton, both of Ray's grandfathers were barristers from Lincoln's Inn in London.

Satish's son Jyotish Ray qualified as a barrister in xxxx. After returning to Calcutta he married Charubala, the only child of Joy Chandra and Uttama Sundari Dutta, who were settled in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). Joy Chandra was an engineer who became a wealthy businessman building rail tracks in Burma. He persuaded Jyotish to move from Calcutta to Rangoon, where he practiced as a barrister at the Rangoon High Court.

Jyotish' son Sachis, Ashis's father, was born in Rangoon in xxxx. When the Japanese invaded the country during World War II, the Ray family were forced to leave Rangoon for Calcutta. They ultimately lost all their properties, business (now exporting Burma teak to Antwerp) and other assets, when a military dictatorship took over the country in 1962 nationalising or derecognising ownerships of people of foreign origin. When the partition of India occurred, they also lost a house in Dhaka and their ancestral home in Ulpur. It was a traumatic descent from considerable riches to almost refugee status. Both Jyotish and Charubala died prematurely a few years after leaving Rangoon.

Undeterred, Sachis resumed his higher studies in Kolkata, succeeding in becoming a doctor. and then going on to qualify in obstetrics and gynaecology from Vienna, London and Dublin. Sachis married Roma, daughter of Bivabati Bose and Sarat Chandra Bose in xxxxx.

Sarat Chandra Bose was an eminent and leading barrister at the Calcutta High Court, having qualified from Lincoln's Inn, London. He was also cabinet minister in the central interim government in India before transfer of power from British to Indian hands. He was the elder brother and mentor of the legendary Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the youngest and most charismatic presidents of the Mahatma Gandhi-led Indian National Congress.

Subhas Chandra Bose was later the founder and leader of the Indian National Army, which launched a valiant but unsuccessful campaign with the help of Japanese forces from Myanmar to liberate India. More about him here?

Early life
Ashis was born in Vienna on 28 June, 1951. His birth was registered with the Indian consulate in the Austrian capital and his name included in his mother's passport to record him an Indian national. His father named him "Indrajit", which was changed to Ashis after his return to India, to fall in with the Ray family tradition of names of male members ending with an "is" or an "ish". Ashis with his parents moved to London in 1952, where they lived in Brentford while his father worked at West Middlesex Hospital.

Coincidentally, Ashis's great-aunt, Emilie Schenkl, Austrian-born partner of Subhas Chandra Bose, and their daughter Anita (now Pfaff) lived in Vienna. So he benefited from their affection in a land faraway from his own in the absence of his maternal grandmother who was in Kolkata, though her husband had passed away in 1950.

Upon the family's return to India, Ray went to school in Kolkata before going to St Paul's, a British boarding school in Himalayan hill station of Darjeeling. He then came back to Kolkata to read at St Xavier's school and college, abandoning ambitions of following in his father's footsteps to become a doctor.

Media Career
Ray's first radio broadcast was in April 1971 on Kolkata's "Yuv Vani" or the youth service of All India Radio (AIR). He was 19. It was live and a summary of India's just concluded cricket tour of the West Indies, the visitors having won the test series there for the first time. Cricket was Ray's passion; with this maiden effort, broadcasting and writing on it became a part of his profession.

A year later, Ray graduated to the general service of AIR, and in due course expanded his repertoire to doing live running commentary not only on cricket, but on football, hockey, tennis, badminton, golf and various other sports.

In 1975, at the age of 23, he edited and published a Calcutta Football Manual, a pioneering publication on India's premier 1st division city league.

On 28 November of the same year - aged 24 - he did his first ball-by-ball commentary in a cricket test match at Nagpur, becoming the youngest person in the world to do so.

The following year, he ran into difficulty with the Indian Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, which controlled All India Radio and Doordarshan (state television), which were then the only electronic media in the country. India was under a state of emergency. Ray refused to present a documentary on a conference of the youth wing of the Congress party - which he felt was disproportionate coverage for the event. As a result he was stripped of assignments to commentate on three tests before being reinstated for the final India-England fixture at Mumbai. He was, at 25 the most frequently used test match commentator in India as well as a presenter of a variety of special programmes on Doordarshan.

After the emergency was lifted in 1977, he was urged by senior officials at Doordarshan to take his case to the Shah Commission, which had been set up to inquire into alleged excesses during the emergency. He declined to do so. Instead, he seized an opportunity to go to London to pursue a career with BBC.

At BBC, he became a reporter and commentator on sports, especially cricket and presenter of a weekly current affairs programme called South Asia Survey - both on its World Service.

In 1977, he was extended the rare distinction of joining BBC's Test Match Special (TMS) programme as a guest during the 3rd test at Trent Bridge, Nottingham. In 1979, he was on TMS on India's matches in the Cricket World Cup. He went on to commentate on India-England test series, India-Australia tests and one-day internationals in Australia and several international tournaments in the 1980s. He reduced his cricket commitments to join Independent Television News (the private sector competitor to BBC in Britain) as its South Asia correspondent in 1989. A decade later he returned to more regular engagement with the game, including doing studio analysis on World Cups on Sony Entertainment Television and commentating on test matches on radio in the West Indies. He briefly also renewed his association with TMS during the 2007 World Cup.

Thereafter, he became a studio analyst on the UK's SKY SPORTS - among few non-international cricketers to be so utilised.

Contemporaneously in the 1980s he was analysing South Asian affairs on BBC's domestic service known as Radio 4 and its nightly in-depth news programme on TV Newsnight.

In 1981, Ray accepted an offer from India's Ananda Bazar Group (which publishes among other titles, the leading Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika and The Telegraph of Kolkata) to take charge of their London office, which also meant being the chain's Europe correspondent. Going freelance as a result, he now expanded to broadcasting on South Asian affairs on Channel Four and ITV, as well as BBC.

On 31 October 1984, he was the first to comment in the studios of BBC-TV on the news of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, immediately after its correspondent in Delhi broke the news of her death. A few days later, he co-anchored ITN's live coverage of her funeral.

In 1989, he correctly forecast the defeat of Congress prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi's defeat in the general election and the election of Vishwanath Pratap Singh of the Janata Dal as his successor. A year and a half later, he broke the news of the former's assassination on electronic media anywhere on ITN and CNN.

In 1991, CNN offered him the post of its founding South Asia bureau chief, which he accepted. In April-May of 1992, Ray provided ground breaking coverage of the overthrow of the Soviet-backed Afghan regime of President Mohammad Najibullah by the mujahideen, including incredibly the first ever live on-camera shot out of Kabul, where there was no electricity, conventional phone, fax or telex communication at the time. From Afghanistan in the west to Thailand in the east, Nepal in the north to Sri Lanka in the South, not to mention India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the region threw up stories of violence, but also of India's landmark economic reforms. He was there to cover it, as well as doing a documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the Union Carbide Bhopal gas disaster.

He was the first to interview on-air Indian Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao after the apocalyptic destruction of the Babri Mosque in the town of Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh by Hindu zealots in December 1992. He similarly often interviewed several heads of government in Pakistan, including Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the political leaders of China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and United States Secretaries of State.

After his stint in South Asia, he returned to London as CNN's Consultant Editor.

In 1995, he was conferred the National Press Award in India. In 1982, as a part of a portrayal at the Commonwealth Institute in London linked to the that year's Festival of India in Britain, he was nominated among 10 prominent Indians living in the United Kingdom for his services to broadcasting.

'''What about Australia's "Voice of India"? Also among the top Indians.....?'''

After leaving full time employment with CNN, his RAYMEDIA LIMITED has been involved in a variety of media services, including being consultants to CNN and other American companies. It acquired TV rights to Davis Cup tennis and licensed and produced such ties.

Great Moments of Indian Cricket, 2 books, events (Kashmir, Vince Cable)......

Personal life
Ashis lives in North West London with his wife Pritha who is a civil servant. They have a daughter, Debika and son, Agnish.