If Pegasus is India's Watergate moment, here is the one book that you need to read

The takeaways from “All The President's Men”, that landmark account of investigative journalism

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, a young man is arrested one morning and sent to the gallows without ever knowing the crime. George Orwell’s 1984 portrays a society where “doublethink” prevails -- thus war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength -- and “power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing”. Dystopian fiction mastered by the likes of Kafka and Orwell have become a nightmarish reality. But reality too sometimes mimics art (think the big-brother-is-watching scenario of The Truman Show). As the unfolds, with phones of politicians, lawyers, journalists, activists hacked, are we mere props in a digital world without any filters? Pegasus is being referred to as India’s Watergate moment, which prompts us to look back at the eponymous scandal of the 1970s when the investigation of two American journalists into a break-in forced a President to resign. The journalists, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, wrote about their probe months before President Nixon’s resignation in the Pulitzer Prize-winning All The President’s Men (February, 1974), later made into a film with verisimilitude; the paper’s Executive Editor at the time, Ben Bradlee, dedicated a chapter to Watergate in his memoirs, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures as also the publisher, Katharine Graham, in her autobiography Personal History.