Mark Tully
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Mark Tully was born in Kolkata,India in 1936. He was the Chief of Bureau, BBC, New Delhi for 20 years. Schooled in England, he stayed mostly in India covering all major accidents in South Asia during his tenure. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1985 and the Padma Shree in 1992, a rare exception for a non-Indian.
Mark Tully was the son of a wealthy accountant. He was brought up by a strict European nanny and did not come to Britain until he was ten. "England struck me as a very miserable place", he later recalled, "dark and drab, without the bright skies of India." He was educated at Marlborough Public School and Cambridge.
After Cambridge, Mark Tully considered becoming a priest in the Church of England but abandoned his vocation after just two terms at Lincoln Theological College.
Very soon after joining the BBC, Tully became India Correspondent in 1964. Whether it was dodging the bullets on the India-Pakistan border, describing the poverty of Kolkata's street beggars or detailing the horrific aftermath of the Bhopal chemical disaster, he gave a unique insight into the life of the subcontinent.
More recently, he has presented a BBC television series, The Lives of Jesus, using India, as well as the Holy Land, to explain the mysteries of Christ's divinity. He has also written several books based on India including No Full Stops in India, The Heart of India, Divide and Quit, India – 50 years of Independence, God, Jew, rebel, the Hidden Jesus – An investigation into the lives of Jesus and many others.
For someone who has lived and professed to love India for many decades, Sir Mark suffers the disadvantage of speaking atrocious Hindi. The ultimate "burra sahib", the Orientalist who has on more than one occasion called India 'a Hindu nation'. Though England and the ever so English BBC might like to glorify Mark Tully (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1735083.stm), many Indians still find it hard to understand Tully's insistence that India surrender to the fanactical religiosity and move away from what he sees as the nehruvian aspiration for Western secularism.
External Links
- How Indians perceive Mark Tully (http://www.indianexpress.com/ie20020106/cent4.html)