By IANS
Kolkata : Dilip Ganguly, a veteran Indian journalist of the American international news agency Associated Press who made a name for himself with his coverage of the 1991 Iraq War, passed away here Sunday. He was 58.
Ganguly, who took charge of AP's Kolkata bureau in April after serving in Sri Lanka for a decade, died of a celebral attack. He battled death for nearly two weeks in a city hospital till the end came at around 12.40 p.m. Sunday.
Ganguly was in coma since suffering brain hemorrhage July 14.
Ganguly, whose 21-year career at AP saw him report from Baghdad during the Gulf War, on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and on stories across South Asia, began his career in Republic, a small publication in Patna.
He joined the United News of India (UNI) in the early 1970s in New Delhi and worked there for years. He had also worked for the Amrita Bazar Patrika as well Japan's Kyodo news agency in its New Delhi bureau.
In 1986 he joined AP in New Delhi.
"My father 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," said his son Shonal Ganguly, who works for APTV.
Among Ganguly's high profile assignments – and the one 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' looked as if someone had set off tens of thousands of firecrackers," he wrote in a dispatch about the night the US-led coalition began bombing the city.
Louis D. Boccardi, then chief executive of AP, praised Ganguly's "courageous and steady performance" in a note to Ganguly, who made it out of Iraq a few days later.
"Dilip's passion was getting the story in tough places," said John Daniszewski, AP's International Editor. "He was a person who lived and breathed the news, whether in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia."
According to AP, in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's government tapped his telephone. But when Ganguly called his wife in India and started speaking Bengali, the line was cut because the government didn't have Bengali translators.
Ganguly returned to Iraq after the war. He later covered the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia.
Ganguly was born in 1949 in Ranchi in Jharkhand. He graduated from Ranchi University.
He also worked for several years in Dhaka as the UNI correspondent in the 1970s and made a mark with his reporting of a newly independent nation.
In 1997, Ganguly was named correspondent in Colombo. In April this year, he moved to Kolkata to bolster AP's coverage of India.
Ganguly was cremated Sunday. He is survived by his wife Nupur and two sons.