WE MEET Ashish Joshi virtually. He is on holiday, spending time with his family, but being the genuinely lovely person he is, Joshi made time to speak to the GG2 Power List.
If that pang of guilt was not there then, it would be moments later. The Christmas tree looks festive, and Joshi looks relaxed. After a quick introduction to his daughter, we start to chat. He tells us that he has just moved to a new house, and most of us know how stressful it is, especially with young children. Moments later, the Sky News health correspondent reveals that in November, just weeks ago, he was in hospital with a fever spike and a leg the size of a balloon. It was the consequence of an injury he sustained while playing football with his young son three years ago.
“I thought I had the flu, and the leg pain was just because I was running around from pillar to post, as you do. My wife said, ‘Look, I think you need to go and get your leg looked at again’. So, I went off to hospital. A wonderful doctor rolled up my trouser leg and said, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty nasty abscess. Let’s pencil you in for surgery tomorrow morning’. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I was due to fly off to Thailand three days later, and that’s exactly what happened to me three years previously. I broke my leg a week before travelling to Thailand. So, my family thinks it’s a curse, and we’re not allowed to go to Thailand.”
Joshi has been at Sky News since 2004, arriving from Zee TV. Within weeks he was sent to Sri Lanka to cover the Boxing Day tsunami, being one of the first UK journalists to cover the disaster. It is clear throughout our interview, he loves Sky News, his bosses and his colleagues.
“I’d been at Sky literally two months before I went off to cover the tsunami, that wouldn’t have happened in any other organisation anywhere,” he recalls. “If you’re there, you’re there to do a job. Those news editors, when you are dispatched, they don’t sit back and say, ‘Right, so we’ve got Ashish. Now he’s been here for two months, and he’s done this story’. No, they say, ‘It’s Joshi. He’s on the list. Go’. I got a phone call, ‘Your flight’s booked at 10 o’clock, make your way to the airport. We’ll see you when you’re back’. So, I thought, ‘What? Really?’”
Since then, barring holidays and breaking bones, Joshi has never been off Sky News, explaining stories simply, humanly and brilliantly. He has won the highest awards, which demonstrate he remains at the top of his game.
His coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks in November-December 2008 bagged him a Golden Nymph at the 2009 Monte Carlo Television, and his first British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nomination.
The thing about Joshi is that his humanity shines off the screen.
In 2018, he won a BATFA and Emmy for his coverage of the Rohingya crisis on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. By this time, Joshi was a foreign correspondent, and his bosses sent him to Bangladesh just to scope out the potential of the story. But, as so often in the past, they trusted his judgement, and when he told them it was a story of huge humanitarian proportions, they cleared the news schedules.
But on this story, his involvement went further than the simple reporting of facts.
What he wanted, he told his team on the ground, was to cover the children who have been affected by the brutal actions of Myanmar soldiers and citizens. That is how he came to sit opposite an 11-year-old Rohingya Muslim orphan called Zoora.
“She had seen her mother and father butchered, had seen all her brothers and sisters shot dead, and every home razed to the ground,” he explains. “Zoora had swum across a river, and she’d been shot in the thigh by soldiers. So, I’m trying to process all of this, and at the same time, I’m thinking, I have a daughter your age. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair.”
After he walked out of the interview, he had more nagging questions. When he spoke to his researcher, Joshi realised that Zoora would be trafficked, and overnight she would be forced to become a sex worker, probably in India or the Middle East, by the very men in the refugee camp. “I spoke to a few of my friends, and I said, ‘Look, I’m going to do something for this girl. I have a good network on the ground. Let’s just raise some money, all of us just put some money together, just so that the traffickers know this girl has a little bit of protection. We’ll find her a teacher, get her education sorted, mentor, pay, give her some assurance so she could sleep at night.’”
Joshi admitted he was out of his depth and had never done this before. But to his surprise 24-hours later, thanks to the generosity of crowd funders, he had raised £15,000.
“Zoora’s 14 now, and she’s going to school. She’s learning a trade, she’s becoming a seamstress, we bought her a sewing machine. She’s been reunited, not with extended family, but people she used to live with in her village, and her life is much better than it was three years ago. Here’s the thing, when I was in hospital fighting for my life, I got a little video WhatsApp message from Zoora praying for my recovery, and I burst into tears.”
Today, Joshi is doing a job he never thought he would ever want to do, being a specialist correspondent for Sky News. What started as a temporary role had blossomed into the story of our time.
“What changed for me is I got to work with a brilliant producer who thought a lot like me,” he says. “We started covering really important stories about autism, about people with learning difficulties and special needs being locked up in units. We started talking about mental health, and did really compelling, engaging, strong visual stories.
“Then the pandemic happened, and the story has been incredible, because it’s affected all of us in so many different ways. It’s been 12 months of incessant work, and it’s been an absolute honour to work as Sky’s health corre[1]spondent, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
