Lauren Frayer
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.
Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.
In Europe, Lauren chronicled the economic crisis in Spain & Portugal, where youth unemployment spiked above 50%. She profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. From Paris, Lauren reported live on NPR's Morning Edition, as French police moved in on the Charlie Hebdo terror suspects. In the fall of 2015, Lauren spent nearly two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.
Farther afield, she introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.
Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.
On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.
Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.
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The government says its priorities are "restoration of normalcy and deepening of democracy" in Indian-controlled Kashmir. But people who have left the region this month paint a different picture.
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People fleeing Kashmir describe what it's been like to live under a three-week communications blockade. The Himalayan territory is split between India and Pakistan.
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"It's like they are trying to erase us — erase all of my people," says the widow of a Muslim dairy farmer who died after being assaulted by a mob while he was transporting cows.
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Indian-administered Kashmir is now in its fourth day of a communications blackout, following the government's decision to revoke its special status. Pakistan has downgraded diplomatic ties.
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When parents in the U.S. paid huge sums to secure places for their children in top schools, it was a scandal. In India, it's acceptable for parents to pay private universities for this purpose.
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In the days ahead of the move, India placed local politicians under house arrest, ordered tourists to evacuate and sent tens of thousands of troops into the region.
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A certain number of seats at schools in India are reserved for those paying double or triple tuition. And unlike the Varsity Blues scandal here in the U.S., this behavior is legal in India.
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Reservoirs are dry in India's sixth biggest city. Municipal taps work only a few hours a day. Trains are delivering emergency water supplies.
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It's almost as tall as the Taj Mahal. It smolders and festers. And it's a source of income for slum dwellers nearby.
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The changing climate is especially brutal in India. Temperatures are soaring. Asphalt roads are melting. People are dying.