Everyone seemed to have a Mark Tully story to share at the launch of Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia at The Ambassador Hotel on Tuesday evening. Foreign correspondents and local journalists came together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Initially known as the Foreign Correspondents Association, the FCC was founded in 1958, and has counted many eminent journalists and photographers such as David Orr, Mark Tully and Pablo Bartholomew among its members. Edited by the president of FCC, John Elliot, along with Bernard Imhasly, former FCC president and author of Goodbye to Gandhi?, and Simon Denver, Reuters Bureau Chief for India and Nepal, the book is a collection of 86 articles by 70 foreign correspondents. "The book traces the shifting perceptions of India and the world. It is a collection of the best writing about South Asia, history as it happened,' said Mike Bryan, CEO, Penguin India. Elliot talked about how the idea of the book was conceived nearly 10 years ago by Imhasly but work started on it only last April. "We invited articles from correspondents who have covered the region over the last 50 years and we received more than 400,' said Elliot, who went on to thank all the newspapers and magazines from where the articles had been sourced, and who waived all charges of reprinting. The introduction recounts the time when news reporting began from India two centuries ago, dispatches from Calcutta, then the capital, took four months to reach the English port of Falmouth. In this volume, foreign correspondents have covered subjects as diverse as tiger hunts, religious fanaticism and the Indian enthusiasm for P G Wodehouse. Among the highlights of the book is Peter Kann's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the fall of Dacca in 1971, Barbara Crossette's eyewitness report of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, Benazir Bhutto's 1997 interview with Julian West and slain correspondent Daniel Pearl's two essays on the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat and about smuggling in Afghanistan. Joining the editors and Bryan onstage were former diplomat and columnist G Parthasarathy and Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express Shekhar Gupta. While Gupta shared the first Mark Tully anecdote, Parthasarathy spoke of how a certain Prime Minister had asked him to source Yes Minister tapes from the UK, which soon became an inside joke shared by the PM and him. "The concept of news today has been changed by CNN which led the way for the news channels. But if you want a story with in-depth analysis and research, it is still the print media you turn to,' he said.