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Padma Rao Sundarji

Padma Rao Sundarji aka. Padma Rao (born 17 June 1959) is an Indian journalist, editor, author. After an early spell as a freelance features writer in the mid to late eighties, she has primarily worked as a foreign correspondent with the German media since 1989. She has worked at ARD (German Radio and TV), Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) and was the South Asia bureau chief for German newsmagazine Der Spiegel for 14 years (1998-2012). She resigned in April 2012, when the magazine refused to regularize her annual contract and fought and won a long legal  battle against the publication in the Delhi High Court in 2019. She is also the author of “Sri Lanka: The New Country” (HarperCollins India 2015) and writes in both English and German. She was part of the core team of senior editors at India’s Wion television and later national editor with the Hindustan Times. As a freelancer specialized in the Indian Ocean Region and multilateral politics, she has written for Die Welt, Handelsblatt, Tagesspiegel, GEO and other publications of Germany, SonntagsZeitung of Switzerland, Wiener Zeitung of Austria, and covered the Mumbai riots and other stories as a special to McClatchy DC (USA). She writes in both English and German. While her work in German can be found under “Padma Rao”, she retained her married name for publishing within India, to avoid confusion with another writer. In addition to fluent Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, she also has an intermediate diploma in French.

'''Personal life ''' Rao received her Bachelor’s degree in English (H) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and completed the 2 year post graduate diploma, earlier known as the Grosses Deutsches Sprachdiplom (it is today known as C-2 and is the most advanced GER language certification of the European Union) from the Goethe Institut and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. She was married to writer Vikram Sundarji and has a son.

Career

Rao began her writing career as a freelance contributor for the Indian Express and others, while undergoing training as a teacher of German at Max Mueller Bhavan Delhi and simultaneously reading for her Bachelor’s at St Stephen’s College. In order to finance two years in Germany to attend three-hour lectures for the advanced German pg diploma every evening, Rao took on an administrative job at Radio Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany. After  graduating with GDS with top honours, she returned to India to teach German at MMB for some semesters, continued writing freelance and simultaneously pursued a full-time intensive course in French at the Alliance Francaise de Delhi, till the level of an intermedia diploma. In 1989 after the birth of her son, she entered the news business full-time, initially as a researcher and reporter with ARD German Radio and Television (NDR) in New Delhi. In 1993, she joined Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa)’s experimental satellite English desk in New Delhi as a news editor. The desk folded up in 1995. After a brief stint at Geo magazine’s photo desk in New York, she joined ARD-WDR German TV in New York as a reporter, with special focus on the United Nations (UN)headquarters in the city. Simultaneously, she was also Indian newsmagazine Outlook’s first NYC correspondent. In 1997, she returned to India and  joined The Daily Pioneer as a Special Correspondent for foreign affairs. In April 1998, she was appointed the Chief of Southasia Bureau for German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and covered the Kargil war, the Sri Lankan civil war from its various battlefields, the Asian tsunami, the fate of Diego Garcians in Mauritius, the Asian tsunami, the Bhuj earthquake and many other natural disasters across the region. Rao also interviewed Pakistan PMs Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, Indian PMs Atal Behari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh, Sri Lanka’s current and former PMs Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, former Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed, and many other ministers in all South Asian countries. She also interviewed Tibetal spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa Ugyen Trinley Dorje just a day after he had fled from China,  underground rebel leaders like terror group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE’s) chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, separatist group Hizbul Mujahedeen’s head Syed Salahuddin, Nepal’s former PM Prachanda (in his earlier avatar as the Maoist chief) and others.

Between 2005 and 2008, Rao was invited to Europe as keynote speaker on India and China as the emerging Asian economies by the Opti Foundation of the Government of Spain, the Swiss Futurists’ Conference in Lucerne and as a member representing India to a brainstorming session by European Air Defence (EADS) and Airbus, just two days before the Mumbai terror attacks of November 26, 2008, for which she abandoned the workshop, to fly back to Mumbai for live coverage for her then employer, Der Spiegel.

From 2005-2007, Rao was also the elected President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia (FCC) in New Delhi. Rao quit Der Spiegel in 2012 and worked as a media advisor to various advocacy groups and public health organizations, while continuing to freelance for Die Welt, Handelsblatt, VerDi, Berliner Tagesspiegel (Germany), McClatchy DC (USA), SonntagsZeitung and TagesWoche (Switzerland), Wiener Zeitung (Austria), and various other national and international publications. She remained a frequent guest on television network debates in India,and travelled in Sri Lanka for long spells to research her book, “Sri Lanka: The New Country” which was published by HarperCollins India in 2015. It was released in India by Nirupama Rao, India’s former foreign secretary and high commissioner to Sri Lanka and in Sri Lanka by former Sri Lankan foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera. The book received excellent reviews in Sri Lanka and in India.*

Rao worked as a senior editor of the founding team of Indian television channel Wion from 2016 to March 2018, and then as National Editor with the Hindustan Times, from October 2018 to May 2020, during which she once again interviewed Sri Lanka’s top political leadership and also global business leaders and sports stars in the headlines. In May 2020, Rao quit HT voluntarily to take on a short-term contract with an international organization, and to commence research for her second commissioned book on Sri Lanka.

Awards and Honours:

The Rajiv Gandhi Award for Best Literary Personality, 2015 by the Pehchhan Foundation for the Girl-Child.

Published Works:

Rao is the author of “Sri Lanka: The New Country” (HarperCollins India 2015), a well-received work on the aftermath of the 3o-year Sri Lankan civil war. In 1992, she had also co-authored a travel guide on South India for Merian publishers, Germany and her work on Diego Garcia appeared in “Foreign Correspondent: 50 years” (Penguin India, 2009). She has contributed to various anthologies of writing from India like “Rising India: Europe’s Partner?” (Weißensee Verlag, Germany), and translated German poets Hans-Christoph Buch and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger from German into English for Living Literature series published by the India office of the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg, Germany.

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