When Shlok Talati, Master of Journalism student and recent recipient of the highly coveted Joan Donaldson CBC News Scholarship, arrived at King’s from his native India, he experienced culture shock as well as climate shock. “Things are a lot calmer and quieter here. I was used to living in a place where you keep bashing into people,” he laughs. And journalists, he says, can be introverts. “I hardly interacted with anyone for the first month. I didn’t know the culture and the kind of conversations people have. Everything was so new to me.” It was his professors who initially warmed the waters for him. “They knew it was difficult for me and they initiated conversations. They were always there to talk and help.” Talati’s learning curve wasn’t just social. “I had to learn how people here think and write and consume news. They view the news and journalism very differently from India, from a [developing] country. I didn’t have a language barrier, but the cultural barrier was significant.”
Talati found his way, so much so that he’s about to be a Donaldson scholar with a four-month paid internship at the CBC. He’ll spend three months in Toronto working on The World This Hour and Metro Morning followed by a month-long regional placement in Regina, Sask. “The Donaldson Scholarship is highly competitive, but Shlok clearly stood out among the applicants,” Terra Tailleur, Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Journalism, asserts. “He’s able to produce a range of stories, even in the most challenging situations. CBC is fortunate to have him.”
Talati has long known he wanted to be a journalist. He interned with local news organizations while doing an undergraduate degree in communications at Pandit Deendayal Energy University in Gandhinagar. The fact of India having few good journalism schools and a desire to experience journalism in another culture led him to Canada and to King’s where he writes for The Signal and has been interning at New Canadian Media covering immigrant issues. “I had so much to learn…the history of Canada, Indigenous and Black issues, equality issues, things I was not at all familiar with. My professors helped me with all of that. The way I’ve grown as a journalist at King’s is unbelievable.” Most comfortable working in print journalism, Talati is excited, though cautious, about his upcoming Donaldson Scholarship experience. “They throw you into a professional newsroom and you’re expected to work at a very high standard. Both Metro Morning and The World This Hour are radio shows. I can see that they are going to challenge my boundaries.”
Two years into his undergrad in India, Covid struck and Talati found himself covering the news of local hospitals overwhelmed with Covid patients. “It was the most harrowing experience. There would be hundreds of people lined up trying to be admitted. I saw people dying on stretchers waiting to be attended to. People were asking for help from me because there was nobody else there. And there was nothing I could do. The lines blurred and I started getting people water…filling out forms to get people admitted…I helped with stretchers, unloading people from ambulances. I watched people giving up and dying. It was an extraordinary situation.” In the end, Talati says, the experience was somehow grounding. “It shaped a lot of who I am right now. It made me calmer somehow and has given me perspective into emotions, grief, the temporality of everything.”
Close to finishing his MJ program and preparing to move to Toronto for the Donaldson CBC internship, Talati has a clear vision of his future; he would like to work in Canada for a couple of years and continue to develop his skills before returning to India. India, he says, needs more good journalists. “What I’m taking back from the program at King’s is my growth; the way I’ve grown these last couple of years is unbelievable. I love to write and I love working on the ground doing news stories. You can go up to anyone and talk to them and they’ll have something interesting to tell you about their day, their lives. You’ve got close to eight billion stories in the world right now waiting to be told.”
