Making Headlines From BBC to Bloomberg

From the many invaluable lessons Karishma Vaswani learned from her Middle and High School years at JIS, two especially stand out.

The first came when she received a zero on a ninth-grade English essay. She knew it was good and that the writing was strong — but her grammar wasn’t. Her teacher, Mrs. Lohman, had deducted 10 points for every missing or misplaced apostrophe, which she had been struggling with for some time. 

“It was brutal, but she was right,” Karishma concedes.

The moment may have rattled her, but it also set the standard for the rigor she would uphold throughout her career as a journalist. 

Her JIS experience gave Karishma something else just as enduring: a sense of belonging. Today, as Bloomberg’s Asia political columnist with decades of experience delivering the news both in front of and behind the broadcasting camera, she says she walks into every room believing she deserves to be there. 

“That confidence, being told you belong, you deserve to be here, that came from JIS. I walk into rooms, and it’s never occurred to me that I don’t deserve to be there,” she says. “That comes from this idea at JIS that we’re all accepted, we respect each other, and we come from all over the world. Those were some of the best years of my life. I love that school.”

That sense of confidence proved to be especially valuable as Karishma took her first steps into journalism soon after graduating from JIS. Her goals for the future were clear.

“I knew I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was 12. When I was 18 or 19, I interned with the BBC right after I finished high school. And while I was in university in the UK, I interned in Indonesia, so I've had a long, long history of covering Indonesia, and I love it. Obviously, that was developed while I was at JIS,” she explains. “I knew I wanted to see the world. I knew I wanted to understand history from up close — I've done that, I think.”

After completing a bachelor's degree at the University of Warwick, Karishma moved to Singapore just as the dot.com bubble burst. She quickly learned that jobs were scarce, sending out application after application to companies both in Singapore, of which she was a citizen, and Indonesia, which had always felt more like home.
Her persistence paid off in the form of a “shop floor” role as a news assistant on the graveyard shift at NBC Asia. Much of her job involved searching through a “freezing cold room” filled with alphabetized VHS tapes, locating the right footage to match the stories editors were preparing for a 7 AM program. 

“I also had to print scripts for the anchor, get their water just right, or coffee if they wanted it. That was my job for two years,” Karishma recalls, conceding that the work was demanding and often exhausting, but it gave her a raw, close-up look into the realities of what went on behind the scenes in the fast-paced world of broadcast journalism. 
“When I look back, I made some amazing friends. I learned a lot about the industry. I think what it drilled into me was that news is tough; breaking news, daily news, is tough. It’s sink or swim, and you need to be able to do the hard yards.”

From there, her career took her across major international newsrooms, including the BBC as a correspondent and presenter, before leading her to her current role at Bloomberg, where she writes as an Asia political columnist.
“I am there as an Asia political columnist, so I cover the region all the way from China and India down to Australia, but I have a special focus on US-China relations and China in Asia,” she explains. “My job now is quite different from what I used to do; that was daily news, and now I take a sort of stand-back approach to news, and I write way more than I ever did.”

The shift has turned Karishma into a reputable voice in the regional news landscape, with audiences and news outlets seeking out her views and opinions on global issues. From human-interest stories to major political developments, her reporting spans a wide range of topics and themes, each of which she takes seriously and with a great appreciation for the privilege she has to tell these important stories.  Her work has also been formally recognized, including an Asian Television Award for Best News Program and being named one of Asia’s leading journalists by Forbes.

“I have a lot of freedom, and I have to write about the destruction of the world order a lot, but I also get to write about stuff that I feel the world and my audience will appreciate. It’s a real privilege. I love that part of the job. I'm really lucky — I get paid to read and talk to people and ask questions and travel.”

Of course, speaking publicly about global politics also brings its fair share of challenges. Ruffling feathers is a common part of the job, for which she gets quite a bit of online pushback. 

“Obviously, your piece has to be well researched, well backed up. The one really good thing about being an opinion columnist is that I've learnt that you have to have a bit of a thick skin,” she says. “People are not always going to agree with you. But if they can disagree with you agreeably, I think that's the foundation of civilized discourse — that's what I'm trying to do in my work.”