Mumbai girl awarded journalism’s holy grail

National swimming champion, Geeta Anand, could have practised at the Bombay Gym. But she preferred the Breach Candy pool for its salt water ...

National swimming champion, Geeta Anand, could have practised at the Bombay Gym. But she preferred the Breach Candy pool for its salt water — it made swimming harder.

It’s this tenacious, striving quality that has driven Anand’s remarkable ascent: from Cathedral School to the Asian and Commonwealth Games, to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, to The Wall Street Journal in NYC and now to a Pulitzer Prize, the world’s highest journalism honour.

‘‘My interest in journalism began in school where I edited the school newspaper,’’ 35-year-old Anand told The Indian Express from NY. It was Cathedral’s principal in the Eighties, Colonel Simeon, whose ‘‘excellent moral and academic training’’ influenced her.

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Her Pulitzer Prize winning articles were part of a series of 10 articles focusing on the financial and accounting scandals that rocked corporate America last year; Anand authored two entries. One looked at how Wall Street analysts were sneaking into clinical trials pretending to be doctors or sick patients to gain inside information; the other exposed ImClone’s CEO, Sam Waksal, tracing how he had been forced out of four institutions for misleading research.

‘‘I’m really excited because it’s one of those things you dream of as a journalist and it could easily never have happened…I got into this profession because I wanted to make the world a better place,’’ said the mother of two, who spent a typically south Mumbai life, staying at Malabar Hill.

Anand broke into American journalism the hard way, covering local school boards in the town-hall events. She joined the The Wall Street Journal in 1998, covering the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology.