Currently based in Berlin, Germany, KM Rakesh has been an English-language journalist since 1989, when he started his career in New Delhi, India. He has an extensive background of nearly 35 years, 13 years of which in the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the years in India—the world’s largest democracy.

He last worked as an Associate Editor of The Telegraph, a hugely popular and one of the best edited English dailies in India. He was based in India’s information technology hub of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) in the South Indian state of Karnataka for nearly 14 years. He covered the states of Karnataka (of which Bengaluru is the capital city), the picturesque political beehive of Kerala, and Telangana, which is home to India’s second biggest IT hub, Hyderabad.

A political journalist, Rakesh has reported extensively on social and communal issues in India during his stints with several mainstream publications in New Delhi and Bengaluru.

He started off his career with The Patriot in Delhi in 1989, plunging straight into the national elections held that year and seeing the defeat of the Indian National Congress headed by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He then moved to The Week, a weekly news magazine, also in New Delhi, before joining The Statesman daily in Bengaluru.

The Gulf Today, a Sharjah-based English daily—a sister daily of prominent Arabic daily, Al Khaleej—hired him in 1998. He headed the news bureau at The Gulf Today for about eight years before joining The World magazine and later Emirates Business—both in Dubai. He returned to Bengaluru upon joining The Telegraph in 2011, a position he held until the end of August, after which he moved to Berlin.

His basket of reports includes stories from the strife-torn Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam. Multiple tours to the Kashmir Valley helped him write some in-depth stories on the militancy that was at its peak in the early 1990s. The stories delved into how normal life barely clung on for existence with merely hope as the only fuel for survival as everything, including educational institutions and business establishments, was shut down almost every day.

Another strife zone he reported from was northern Sri Lanka, then under the control of the Tamil separatist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The attacks on minority Christians, Muslims, and other marginalized communities were among his other extensive reports from southern India over the last nearly 14 years. Sustained attacks on churches by Hindu right-wing groups and vigilante attacks on even the otherwise mundane transportation of cows—regarded as holy by these groups—were among the other burning issues he wrote about.

His stint in the UAE coincided with Gulf War II, when the American armed forces operated from a regional base in neighboring Qatar but maintained their presence in the UAE, one of the friendly nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Dubai had thus become a listening post that helped him write relevant stories on the post-9/11 operations in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

The time spent in the UAE also helped him get a ringside view of the Palestinian problem and the suffering of millions, including women and children, many of whom had sought refuge in the Gulf states.

In Berlin he writes about the European Union, India, and the Middle East, leveraging on his vast on-field experience, especially from the latter two.