NO statement about India," Indira Gandhi, daughter of India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, once observed, "is wholly true." Last week, in his capacity as president of the Foreign Correspondents Association of India, TIME's New Delhi Bureau Chief Donald S. Connery sat with officials of the Indian government to give his reporter's recommendations on press arrangements for President Eisenhower's imminent visit. Then, to escape distractions in both his office and at home, he slipped off to New Delhi's Ashoka Hotel to finish up a job that, by specific assignment, he had been working upon for weeks, and for which, in a professional sense, he had been preparing ever since his arrival in India two years ago. The job: a TIME cover on Prime Minister Nehru. The challenge: to cope with the opinion of Indira Gandhi and other sophisticated Indians about reportage on one of the most populous and perhaps the most complex nations upon the face of the earth.

To meet that challenge, New York-born, Harvard-educated Don Connery, 33, had traveled through more of India than most Indian journalists. He had tramped the dusty roads of Bombay state with Land Reformer Vinoba Bhave, hunted rhino in Nepal, lunched with the Wali of Swat, prowled the lower depths of teeming Calcutta, saw Tibet's Dalai Lama soon after his flight to India. Above all, Connery had concentrated on the complex man who personifies India today. Beyond many interviews--"He is enormously generous with his time and has never refused to answer a question"--Connery time and again crossed footsteps with Nehru in unlikely places. In Afghanistan last September, when Nehru was touring a model village, he noticed a familiar figure inspecting the next hut, said in surprise: "I didn't expect to find you here, Mr. Connery."

Reporter Connery's long and careful file arrived in New York to be distilled, evaluated and turned into story form by an able collaborator: Associate Editor Robert McLaughlin, 51. A TIME staffer since 1949, McLaughlin has written in Foreign News since 1957, specializing in the Far East. Besides cover stories on Indonesia's President Sukarno (March 10, 1958), Japan's Princess Michiko (March 23) and Red China's Liu Shao-chi (Oct. 12), McLaughlin wrote the Dalai Lama cover (April 20), which Connery also reported.

In its best sense, the Connery-McLaughlin operation was an example of TIME journalism. From the man on the scene had come a knowledgeable, fact-filled report to be handled by a skilled writer who on his own time has written short stories and three novels (latest: The Notion of Sin), and who could, out of his own experience, make contributions to what TIME hopes Indira Gandhi will consider an accurate portrayal of changing India.

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