I asked one question in a dozen countries.

I was hired out of college by David Ignatius and Fareed Zakaria as the first editor of PostGlobal, the Washington Post's international affairs site. For months I commissioned and edited expert commentary about the world, and gradually concluded that the thing missing from all of it was people.

So I asked my editors to send me away for a year. The proposition was simple enough to fit in a sentence: go to a dozen countries and ask people what they make of America. Not officials — or not only officials. A drag queen in Karachi. A rapper in Beirut. Call center workers in Bangalore. A Filipina sex worker's daughter. A general who fortified Venezuela against a U.S. invasion he was certain was coming. A man in Mexico who became a drug-runner to feed his children. My grandmother.

I wrote and filmed. The video mattered because a transcript cannot carry a face changing its mind.

The series doubled PostGlobal's traffic, which mattered internally because it demonstrated that in-depth international reporting could pay for itself. Other projects at the Post were modelled on it. Fareed called it groundbreaking. But the reason I still think about it is narrower than any of that.

My parents came to America from India determined that I be wholly American. I was kept from Hindi, from other Indian families, from my grandparents — influences they considered backward. Fifteen years later the Washington Post paid me to go back and interview my Dadi Ma about how she saw the country I had been raised to belong to. That was in the series, filed alongside Ahmed Rashid and a Hezbollah leader's daughter.