[2] She also writes a relationships advice column called Giving Gyan for Mumbai Mirror,[3] a city tabloid for the Times of India group.
[4][5] Karkaria was the first Indian on the board of the World Editors Forum, is a recipient of the US-based Mary Morgan-Hewitt Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a Jefferson Fellow of the East West Centre, Honolulu.
Her closely researched pieces in the Times of India provide the social epidemiology of the Indian epidemic over the past 15 years: the plight of marginalised communities caught between life and livelihood, the denial of policy makers, AIDS as the new medical pariah, and the contamination in blood products.
The corpus of her work explained the complex nature and implications of HIV/AIDS, gave it a human face, challenged official apathy, demanded accountability and exposed dangerous hypocrisy.
Karkaria has participated in international AIDS conferences at San Francisco, Berlin, Chiang Mai, Yokohama and Barcelona, and is familiar with the major global players in halting the pandemic.
Appointed the first woman assistant editor of Calcutta's hoary newspaper in 1980, The Statesman, she felt honour-bound to start writing on issues which this patriarchal daily had written about with condescension or simply dismissed as inconsequential.
The scourge of dowry deaths, the ingrained gender prejudice of the police force which prevented the registering of cases, and actual custodial rape all became regular subjects of her editorials and special comment pieces.
Later, when urbanisation became the thrust of her own writing and the papers she edited, she made sure to include the impact of fast-changing cities on health, gender and indeed the delicate web of human relationships.
She was the first to point out the flaws of a 'target-driven' approach, and can claim to have coined the now widely used term, 'foeticide', when she began strongly condemning the snowballing practice of turning amniocentesis from a medical tool into a weapon of gender genocide in the mid-1980s.
Dare to Dream, a best-selling biography of the legendary hotelier MS Oberoi; Mumbai Masti, a richly illustrated book, in collaboration with designer Krsna Mehta, capturing the city's quirky soul; The Cake That Walked, on Flurys, Calcutta's iconic tea-room on the legendary Park Street, plus Erratica and Your Flip Is Showing, collections of her columns and other articles.
This led to her being invited by Egypt's USAID-funded Media Development Project to help set up the Alexandria edition of the Al Youm group, and a couple of years later, in 2008, to conduct a refresher program for them, as well as widen the horizons and upgrade the skills of other local papers.