There are books that explain regions, and there are books that live inside them.
belongs to the latter category—part reportage, part memoir, and part reflective inquiry into what it means to be an Indian journalist navigating the layered realities of the Middle East.
Written by , the book draws upon more than two decades of professional and personal engagement with the Gulf and the wider Middle East. It is shaped by deadlines and dispatches, but also by lived moments that never quite made it into print—awkward encounters, cultural misunderstandings, quiet reckonings, and the slow accumulation of insight that only time allows.
A Journalist’s Journey Through a Complicated Geography
Shahid’s Middle East is not a static backdrop. It is restless, contradictory, and perpetually in motion. Arriving in the region as a young journalist from Bihar, he encounters a landscape where public discourse is carefully policed, identities are closely watched, and words carry consequences far beyond the page.
Early episodes set the tone. A seemingly absurd yet unsettling moment—finding the name Osama Bin Laden inscribed on the headquarters of a company he is about to join, just days after 9/11—captures the uneasy overlap of symbolism, suspicion, and lived reality that would come to define much of his professional life. Such moments recur throughout the book, not as sensational anecdotes, but as entry points into deeper reflection.
From News Reports to Narrative Insight
One of the book’s distinguishing features is the way news reports organically give way to anecdotes and analysis. Shahid does not draw a hard line between journalism and storytelling. Instead, the two bleed into each other, revealing how facts acquire texture when viewed through the lens of experience.
Covering dramatic political developments, economic shifts, and geopolitical realignments, he remains acutely aware of the limits imposed on public conversation in the region. The challenge, as he presents it, is not merely to report events, but to read between silences—to understand what cannot be said as clearly as what can.
Identity, Argument, and Adaptation
At the heart of The Roaming Bihari and His Bagful of Stories lies a sustained meditation on identity. What does it mean to be an “argumentative Indian” in a space where argument itself is constrained? How does one retain intellectual independence without courting professional isolation?
Shahid’s answer is neither defiance nor surrender. It is adaptation tempered by resistance—a constant negotiation between belonging and distance. Over time, the Middle East becomes his karma bhoomi, a place of work, struggle, and self-fashioning. The region shapes him even as he learns to read its rhythms with greater nuance.
The Indian Expatriate Presence Reconsidered
The book also offers a measured examination of India’s expanding expatriate footprint in the Gulf. Shahid traces how Indian workers—long stereotyped and often invisibilised—have gradually altered perceptions through scale, professionalism, and cultural presence.
This is not a celebratory narrative. Nor is it a lament. It is an attempt to understand how stereotypes are formed, challenged, and sometimes quietly dismantled through everyday interactions rather than grand gestures.
A Storyteller Across Forms
Shahid’s ease with multiple forms—journalism, analysis, teaching, podcasts, and theatre—finds reflection in the book’s tonal range. His prose is informed by newsroom discipline but softened by the instincts of a storyteller. There is wit here, but it is restrained; critique, but rarely polemical.
Beyond the page, Shahid’s engagement with storytelling extends to the stage—most notably through an Urdu play on the fading art of letter-writing—and to classrooms and studios where ideas are shaped through dialogue rather than decree.
Why This Book Matters
The Roaming Bihari and His Bagful of Stories arrives at a moment when the Middle East is often reduced to headlines and abstractions. Shahid resists this flattening. His book suggests that regions are best understood not through certainties, but through accumulated ambiguities—the kind that only long residence and attentive listening can yield.
It is a book for readers interested in:
- the lived realities behind geopolitics
- the ethics and constraints of journalism in restrictive spaces
- migration, identity, and cultural negotiation
- the quiet human stories that persist beneath official narratives
Availability and Further Reading
More about the author and his work can be found at:
🌐 https://www.roamingbihari.com/
