http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3959181
Top Indian journalist dies July 30, 2007 Edition 1 NEW DELHI: Dilip Ganguly, whose 21-year career at The Associated Press saw him report from Baghdad during the Gulf War, on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and on stories across South Asia, died yesterday. He was 57. Ganguly, in a coma since suffering a brain hemorrhage on July 14, died in Calcutta, the eastern Indian city where he was based as a correspondent for the news service, said his son, Shonal Ganguly. "Dilip loved being a journalist. His career had taken him around the world and he had shown repeatedly through his hard work and his earnestness just how good a journalist he could be," Shonal Ganguly said. Among the high-profile assignments Ganguly undertook - and which he was most proud of - was covering Baghdad at the start of the 1991 Gulf War. "The sky of the city of 'a thousand-and-one nights' look-ed as if someone had set off tens of thousands of firecrackers," he wrote in a dispatch about the night the US-led co-alition began bombing the city. Courageous "For a moment I thought the Iraqis were rejoicing that the US-led multinational force had backed off. But soon it was all too clear the war had begun." Louis D Boccardi, then chief executive of the AP, praised Ganguly's "courageous and steady performance in Baghdad" in a note to Ganguly, who made it out of Iraq a few days after the start of the air campaign. "Dilip's passion was getting the story in tough places," said John Daniszewski, AP's International Editor. Ganguly was born in 1949 in Ranchi, a city in eastern India. After graduating from Ranchi University he worked at a variety of newspapers, magazines and news agencies - including Agence France Presse and India Today, a weekly news magazine - before joining the AP in New Delhi in 1986. He recently moved to Calcutta to bolster AP coverage of India's emergence as a global power. Ganguly, who was cremated yesterday in accordance with Hindu funeral traditions, is survived by his wife and two sons. - Sapa-AP
