Dus numbri

Tomorrow marks 10 years of this blog’s existence. Around 1700 posts and close to 1.5 million words (an approximation based partly on a formula from the Elder Days when Blogger.com provided total word counts!), give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Strange to think of it, and a little scary too when I skim the archives to find a post I have no memory writing (sometimes little memory of even the book or the film it is about), or read something written by my 27-year-old self that I now completely disagree with or feel terribly embarrassed about. (But then, to paraphrase a famous writer, life is about getting things wrong and wrong and wrong, and then, after careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.)

Wish I had the time to do an elaborate post full of memories, turning points and links to missteps and highlights – and maybe I will in the near future. For now it's enough to say that Jabberwock – which I began in September 2004 with no sense of “purpose”, no idea that it had any long-term prospects or that anyone other than the four or five friends to whom I sent the link would ever read it – has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for most of the good things that have happened in my professional life since then. That’s one reason why I continue to be so proprietorial about it and update it regularly with versions (sometimes twice as long) of most of the pieces I write officially, even though this consumes time and energy, and sometimes seems pointless given that the websites of most newspapers and magazines are better organised and more publicity-savvy today than they were ten or even five years ago.

I have been hearing for years that blogs are passé, but this hasn’t been a “pure blog” for some time anyway – more like a writer’s site, a storeroom for the officially published stuff. That said, even with readership and comments falling over the past 3-4 years (largely the effect of social media and increased online clutter), some of the most rewarding discussions I have here are in the comments sections of relatively “bloggish” posts that don’t intersect with the official writing: this one, for instance, which grew and grew into a discussion board (with just three participants, but still) about continuing developments in the Star Plus Mahabharat. It's amusing to see comments still coming in on ancient posts such as the one about Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, a book that has a profound effect - for good or for bad - on anyone who survives it. (And sometimes it isn't so amusing: I disabled a rant I once wrote complaining about Julia Roberts's teeth, because the post became a magnet for vicious comments from people who love her as well as people who hate her.)

Anyway... more such reflections another time. The site will continue, but I may soon shift it to another domain with my own name, change the design a little, perhaps do away with the Jabberwock “brand”. (One of the things I have done recently is to add a cloud of labels/categories on the right sidebar, but this is very much a work in progress - hundreds of posts haven't been labelled yet.) Will provide updates about all that. Meanwhile, do keep reading.

Schizophrenia, incest, moving in circles

(Have cross-posted this on We the Media, a new blog started by Peter Griffin for those of us who straddle journalism and the blogosphere.)

I've been thinking about the various little circles I find myself in, thanks to both my work and my interests.

First, there’s journalism, which as the cliché goes is an incestuous profession. There’s a lot of truth to that cliché. For a group of people who are expected (by the very nature of their work) to be an informed lot, sensitive to and aware about everything that’s going on in the world, it’s remarkable what a sniveling little bunch of myopic sneaks many of us really are. Many of the mid-level journos I’ve worked with spend all their free time bitching about others in the profession, trading conspiracy theories about why so-and-so left this newspaper and shifted to that magazine, and so on. (If you’ve been in the profession for at least four or five years and changed jobs even once, there will be at most two degrees of separation between you and practically any other journo in town. So there’s plenty of scope for frustration-fuelled gossip where you’re trying to impress younger colleagues with “insider knowledge” about another organisation.)

A subset is features journalism, about which the less said the better. And then there’s the literary circuit, a more bearable lot on the whole (though naturally I’m biased) – but lit-journos very easily become a part of the community they cover (through friendships with like-minded publishers, writers etc), and that leads to even more incest. More than once I’ve found myself at a get-together that includes a) a recently published writer and b) three to four people (including me) who have reviewed his/her book. On the surface it’s all very relaxed and comfortable, but I always find it a bit icky. Am probably being too conservative, but well...

And now, on top of all this there’s the blogosphere, which by comparison is a much more eclectic, dynamic group of people – except that most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis happen to be journos as well! So that’s what my life has become – one incestuous circle intersecting another to make a cosy little Venn diagram, and the upshot is that in the space of a single week I might easily end up meeting the same set of people (including some I’m not even very friendly with) in several different contexts. A book launch/reading. A press conference for a non-literary event. Film preview. Bloggers’ meet. A get-together at a mutual friend’s place.

People on the outside of these intersecting circles think all this must be such great fun, but those of us on the inside (even those who are a lot more social than I am) know how trying it can be. When it becomes too much for me to handle, the one surefire antidote is to catch up with old friends from my pre-journalism days - the ones who are not in any way associated with media (okay, a couple of them are in advertising), or blogging, or literature. They aren’t particularly interested in my work, most of them don’t know I blog (it would never even occur to them to Google my name) and most mercifully of all they never read – except maybe a Dan Brown or a Sidney Sheldon once in a while. It’s always a relief to meet them. Keeps me sane.

P.S. A couple of things got me started on this train of thought. First, a conversation at The Book Shop, Khan Market reminded me of how small and closed the literary circuit really is. I’d picked up The Complete New Yorker from the shop last month, and I asked the owner how the DVDs were selling. “Oh, they’re doing quite well,” he said, looking pleased, “we’ve sold three already.”

Three. One of those was to me, another to Hurree Babu. And here I was thinking that everyone I knew had been rushing to The Book Shop (the first place the DVDs were available in Delhi) in droves to buy those delectable discs. It was quite an eye-opener. Now I’m wondering who that third freak could be.

The other thing is, I’m currently working on a biggish story on – you guessed it – blogging. I’m very ambivalent about such stories because they make me feel schizophrenic. On the one hand I have to be a good journalist and write a piece that will fulfill the requirements of mainstream media (explaining everything for the layperson, setting down facts and figures, etc). But on the other hand, as a dedicated blogger myself, I don’t like oversimplifying the concept for the easy consumption of readers who aren’t Net-savvy. The blogosphere is so varied and amorphous, it doesn’t feel right to define it in simplistic terms. Also, because it’s so vulnerable to being misunderstood or dismissed by those who are on the outside, I feel protective about it – which isn’t the best way to be if you’re writing an MSM story.

Jabberwock turns one: a personal history

(Statutory warning: long, more self-indulgent-than-usual post. Take two aspirin, one before you start and one midway - at which point you’ll probably have to stop reading anyway.)

Blog birthday posts are all the rage this season, so here go my two coins for the collection bowl. A year ago (though it feels much longer) I stopped procrastinating and finally got this blog underway - with some encouragement from *beat of drums* Abhilasha (who doesn't blog herself but loves reading comments), Rajat (who used to blog but stopped) and Rumman (who's been part of the blogging circuit for years, but whose recently converted Missus is now more enthusiastic about it). Speaking practically, it helped that around this time we had finally got a decent Internet connection on our office server (this was important, since I had a painful on-again-off-again dial-up connection at home).

The main reason for starting the blog was that I felt stagnated. Work wasn't very interesting at the time, I had a workmanlike approach to most of my official assignments and was drifting away from writing about the things I was really enthusiastic about. The occasional book review/author profile for the paper was still happening but I hadn't officially written on films for a very long time. Most worryingly, I was starting to get lazy about a habit I had maintained for the previous 4-5 years: that of scribbling notes in a little pad (yes! On paper! With pen!) about each film seen/each book read/an interesting outing with friends or family.

As Salman Rushdie said in a tribute to Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, "Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things - childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves - that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers." Well, writing itself was slipping away from me, and I figured that shifting it to a dynamic medium like the Internet might keep me more interested.

So Jabberwock began, as a forum for the writing I didn’t want to lose touch with, plus as a possible storehouse for some of the published work I was reasonably happy about (very limited in those days). I started with a couple of self-conscious introductory posts, then slowly got around to short posts about films and books, mixed with the occasional rant. Though I had no delusions that the Internet was anything other than a public space, I figured the blog would be read only by the six or seven friends I had tipped off about it, and maybe the occasional arbitrary surfer. I had no clue it could lead to anything bigger.

World, wide, web
My first tangible sense of how this medium can shrink the world came when, on only my second or third day of blogging, an amateur filmmaker based in LA commented on one of my movie posts, saying it made him want to watch (or re-watch) the film. It was a short comment, and of course in hindsight I know that it was no big deal, but it felt good at the time. But the first major high, and one that served to illustrate the power of blogging to me, came a few days later: a comments exchange with Hurree babu of the venerated literary blog Kitabkhana led to the discovery that Hurree was none other than Nilanjana S Roy, whose literary column I had been a big fan of for a very long time. Now Nilanjana is a good friend today and so it feels a little awkward fawning like this (and I know she'll hate it too), but I need to give some background here. I had joined Business Standard a year and a half before I started blogging, and this was a paper she was closely associated with (as a former employee who still wrote regularly for them). Apart from the BS connection, we had similar interests (our beats intersected at Bookreviewville), lived in the same city, and were both members of a profession where (famously, tediously) everyone knows everyone else - but we had somehow never touched base in all that time. And yet, just a couple of weeks after I started blogging, Hurree Babu and Jabberwock knew each other and were communicating regularly. A few months later I was to experience something similar with Amit Varma, whose cricket writings I had admired in Wisden/Cricinfo long before I even knew what blogging was. These friendships and many others like them were forged in the blogosphere, and I'm very grateful for them.

Tipping point
Jabberwock acquired a measure of fame/notoriety, at least in journalistic circles, as the result of a post that (and no one believes me when I say this now) was Not Intended to Change the World. It was in November last year and it was on plagiarism. (Long-time readers will know what I'm talking about. To the others, if you're interested enough go look in the archives, because I'm not going to discuss it explicitly here.) Kitabkhana and DesiMediaBitch, two sites with heavy readership, linked to the post, and my traffic started growing. Offline, I went to journalistic get-togethers and found myself being introduced as "this Enterprising Young Man who blew the whistle on..." and such-like. Senior journalists would sniff self-righteously and tell me, "You did the right thing. This is such a disgrace to the profession. Tsk tsk."

This was all so funny. I wrote that post because a) lazy Sunday, nothing much to do, b) I had just started feeling the onset of Blogger Unrest, which meant that not more than two days should pass before a new post is put up, and c) I thought it would be fun. There was nothing more serious intended - I was far too cynical, not just about the lady in question and the paper she represented (which, to be honest, is a soft target anyway) but about the standards of journalism in general (including some of the stuff I've done myself in the past), to want to Make a Difference in any way. But well, I shouldn’t complain now.

'Personal posts'
People sometimes ask me why I don't make personal posts. Well, the easy answer to that is I didn't start this blog for that purpose; I'm not good at emotional exegesis and don't indulge in it too much even in the private ("hardcopy") diary I've written every night for the last 16 years, except in times of extreme stress. Having said that, I did in fact write a couple of personal posts early on in my blog-life - examples here and here - which I'm a little embarrassed about now (though not enough to want to delete them).

But the question is also a superficial one. In a long post about a certain aspect of a book or film that appeals to me strongly, or when writing something in defence of Sachin Tendulkar, I think I probably say more about myself than in a conventional personal post where I was explicitly discussing my life: because in the latter case there would be a defence mechanism firmly in place, monitoring everything I wrote. I think the same applies to many other bloggers who aren’t private-journal sorts at all; you often need to read between the lines instead of making all-too-easy distinctions between Personal and Impersonal blogging.

On comments and feedback
It’s almost become politically incorrect to admit that you write more for yourself than for others. So let me get this out of the way first: yes, I do greatly value the comments. If I didn’t, I would have disabled them a long time ago (especially since blog comments tend to eat up a large chunk of one’s time, and time has been at a premium for me in the last several months). I never cease to be pleasantly surprised that something I write here can be of interest to someone else, and there’s never been any question of being completely indifferent to the reader.

But the bottomline is, I did start this thing mainly for myself, and in essence I don’t want that to change. Given a choice between writing a long post about an obscure film that means a lot to me (but that few others will have seen or will want to read about) and a facile post on a topic I know everyone will relate to and want to weigh in on, I’ll pick the first one every time. (Of course, the whole point about blogging is that one doesn’t have to make that choice. And I’ve done a bit of both over the past year. But you get the idea.)

Also, I’m a little cynical about comments as indicators of anything. When I write a quick four-line post about a typo I saw in the newspaper that morning, it’s almost certain to get more comments than a carefully thought out and put together post about a film or a book. And it’s always easy to predict which posts will get the most comments - the personal ones and, weirdly enough, the technical ones with rants about Tata Indicom or Airtel or Firefox. So they need to be taken with liberal sprinklings of salt.

The future? No clue really. The blogosphere is getting so cluttered, so information-heavy now that I feel quite lost. So much linking and cross-linking, lots of new bloggers with very interesting things to say - but equally, far too much mediocrity, too many people freely expressing opinions without being informed enough on the topics in question (yes yes Yazad, Amit, I want to be a libertarian, but at times I think I’m just a nasty little fascist deep inside). The best thing to do I suppose is continue posting whatever I want to, as and when I feel like it, without worrying much about readership, site counts etc. Much easier said than done, as any blogger will know, but my increased workload should help me concentrate on some of the other things that need my attention. (Looking at my Blogger dashboard, I see to my surprise that this is my 355th post, which means pretty much one a day on average - and as despairing readers will know, many of those have been v-e-r-y l-o-o-n-n-g! I think that average should dip in the future.)

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who’s read and commented and written in. It’s been a very eventful year and if the next one is even half as exciting, that’ll be exciting enough for me.

Weekend update, and thoughts on blog meets

Amit Varma has kindly invited me to join him and Chandrahas Choudhury on The Middle Stage. Don’t know if I’ll be posting there anytime soon (hell, don’t know if I’ll be blogging on my own site anytime soon – uh, waitaminute, what am I doing now? Foiled again!) but I look forward to it. Will keep you (cross) posted.

Meanwhile, young Chandrahas is in town, a freelancer just like myself (except a freelancer most unlike myself, since he spends his time languidly writing stories for his own pleasure while I draw up ‘to-do’ lists for the five or more deadlines I have to meet each day); and this morning we participated in a bloggers’ meet that, though still not anywhere near the scale of the gargantuan things they hold in Mumbai, was still the largest such meet I’ve been to so far. Six whole people. Self. Chandrahas. Aishwarya Subramaniam and Annie Zaidi, both of whom I’d met before. Janaki Ghatpande, who I hadn't, though she’s one of my oldest blog acquaintances, going back nearly a year. And that noble gentleman from Sri Lanka, Sanjaya alias Morquendi.

A word on blog meets. For the umpteenth time - and despite the scepticism of certain Ducks Who Shall Remain Unnamed who accuse me of being a more social blogger than I claim to be - I’m not the high priest of these gatherings. Yes, I have been in a large number of one-on-one meetings with blogger acquaintances, but (and I’m not saying this to be precious, or to make a point, or to seem anti-social for the romance of it; it’s just a statement of fact) each of those meetings was initiated by the other person. When I respond to such invites, it’s A) partly out of politeness – in my book, being unsociable doesn’t translate into being unnecessarily rude; B) partly because there’s something in the other person’s blog that I find interesting; and C) partly the head-swell factor – if someone calls/mails saying they enjoy reading my posts and would like to meet, well, I’m certainly not immune to that sort of ego massaging.

At this morning’s meet, point B was the determining factor - mainly, wanting to meet Sanjaya, for two starkly different reasons. One, his blog title comes from Tolkien’s Silmarilion, one of my favourite books; and two, the work he did along the Sri Lankan coast when the tsunami struck, tirelessly helping in relief operations while regularly sending SMSes to the Tsunami Help blogmeisters in Mumbai, which were put up on the site as posts.

Didn’t get to discuss any of this, but the get-together was fun and relaxed. Despite the fact that we were a very motley bunch, there were none of those awkward lulls in conversation, no forced raising of topics. We talked about the State of Journalism, cocked the usual snooks at TOI, bemoaned the standards of Café Coffee Day’s service. Morquendi told hilarious stories like the one about two gangs from rival villages in Jaffna facing off in an armed street battle in Toronto (Canada, Canada, the stage for the playing out of the rest of the world’s personal animosities, alas). Also how NDTV has decided to hold him up as the repository of information on all things Sri Lankan, for no better reason than that he is.

I suppose the mark of a successful blog meet is that even when it’s a busy Sunday and you have to get up to leave because there are a lot of other things to do, you feel like this should have gone on for some time more. Today was like that. But I’m going back into my cave now.

Writer’s voice

At Cinefan yesterday I met Trina Nileena Banerjee, fellow blogger and leading lady of the film Nisshabd, which was screened here. We spoke for only a short while but as I was leaving Trina said she had pictured me as being quite different, based on my blog. “I thought you’d be more intimidating,” she said, as I shuffled about awkwardly, studying my shoes.

She had a point – I’m more irreverent and articulate in my writing than in person – but I don’t see why people’s personalities should be expected to exactly match what and how they write. There’s usually a world of difference between the written voice and the spoken voice. In that context I’d urge you to read this essay by Louis Menand, which I came across in the India Uncut archives. (Btw, Amit: the New Yorker link is no longer functional.)

A sampler:

Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with most things in art, there is no straight road from the product back to the person who made it. There are writers read and loved for their humor who are not especially funny people, and writers read and loved for their eloquence who, in conversation, swallow their words or can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high IQ: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and cranky neurotics can, to their readers, seem to be inexhaustibly delightful. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet writers whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment in order to hang on to their infatuation.

At another level, much of the acrimony in the blogosphere (nasty exchanges between blogger and commenter) arises from the disconnect between what a blogger writes and what he/she is like in the real world. Speaking from personal experience, for instance, I often write things in a facetious vein that some readers end up taking very seriously. If these people knew me in person, over a period of time, they’d probably feel less offended: they’d know, for instance, that my rants against PR people are, more than anything else, lame attempts to be funny; that I have close friends in PR (and in marketing, and advertising – two other professions I’m not very charitable to); and that, when in a certain kind of “hold a mirror up to the world” mood, I can be equally disparaging towards my own profession, journalism, or towards some of the things I love doing myself – like spending long hours at film festivals, or reading and reviewing three books a week.

Long-time friends will almost never post an angry, strongly worded comment, even if they completely disagree with something you’ve written. Partly of course that’s because they can just pick up the phone and talk to you about it, or send you a personal mail; but it’s also because, having known you over a period of time, they’re less likely to think of you as a threat to their entire moral universe just because you’ve expressed one opinion (or two, or five) that counters their own beliefs. But with commenters who don’t know the blogger, it’s different – it’s easy for them to misread even one sentence as a summary judgement on them and their way of thinking, and consequently their very existence.

Anyway, I rambleth on, despite promising myself that I’d try to keep my next few posts short. Read that Louis Menand essay – it’s really very good, and you don’t have to look at it in the context of blogging at all.

(P.S. Have cross-posted this at Indi Cubed.)

Journalism vs writing

Chandrahas Choudhury, who’s all but usurped The Middle Stage from Amit Varma, wrote this post recently about Joseph Mitchell’s pieces for the New Yorker, essays that combined good reportage with high-quality writing. It makes me want to get back to a subject I’ve long considered blogging about but have repeatedly put off: good journalism vs good writing, the ways in which the two can overlap and how, so often, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other but are still thought of as the same thing.

There are so many different aspects to this debate, it’s difficult to know where to begin and how to end. But it keeps coming up in one form or the other - from having to read the poorly written, indifferently subbed copy on the front pages of most newspapers, to conversations with journo colleagues who fancy themselves as writers (and talk about “my style”) when they can barely string one gramatically correct sentence together, to discussions with bemused friends who have been exposed to much higher standards of feature writing in other countries (sorry if that sounds snobbish but there it is) and can’t understand why articles have to be completely rewritten by the desk out here.

First, a personal aside so I can try to sift my own prejudices from more general observations. I’ve had a very ambivalent relationship with the profession I’m in, one that’s often bordered on condescension towards it. This is partly because the standards of writing and reportage are both so low (especially in features, and especially in Delhi) that for someone with writerly aspirations it’s easy to think of reporting as a job that merely involves collecting information and putting it together, while not worrying about things like language or style. It’s partly also because of my own strange career trajectory - technically speaking I’ve been in business journalism for over two years now, without ever considering myself a business journalist. I tend to be a little streamlined in my interests and what’s happening in the corporate world doesn’t usually figure among those.

In the last few months things have been good. I’ve been handling the books section of my paper as an add-on, and even my more regular work - on our weekend features supplement - has become more interesting because the supplement has been revamped to make it lighter, less corporate and more lifestyle-ish. Much more space now for profiles on interesting people, film and music, etc.

But for over a year before that I was doing a lot of stuff I just wasn’t interested in - industry stories on shoes and tiles and such, and during those months I thought of myself as a hack journo. I would do these half-hearted interviews, collect little chunks of info, create separate, unstructured paragraphs out of them and then find a lazy linking device between paras that would turn the whole mess into a 1200-word “feature story”. (Also, when writing about a topic I’m not all that clued in to, I don’t want to be over-clever and risk putting foot in mouth, I’d much rather just get the facts down as efficiently as possible.) So the best that could be said about the writing on these pieces was that there were no typos. And when the editor rewrote something, or even gave the story a whole new intro I didn’t care a whit. This wasn’t my writing after all, it was my reporting. I got the byline not for stylish turn of phrase but because of the work I had done in collecting and assembling information. (Meanwhile, just to ensure I didn’t die of boredom or something I would do the occasional book or film review on the side.)

Anyway, that’s my story - and like I said, things have now changed for the better. In some of the more interesting people profiles I’ve done lately, I’ve felt the satisfaction of combining information with a fluid, personal writing style; I’ve actually enjoyed writing the story. Which is of course how it should be in a perfect world.

But Indian journalism, generally speaking, is not that perfect world. One of the reasons is that English isn’t the first language (or sometimes even the second language) for many of the people working as reporters in English-language newspapers and magazines. Many news reporters in particular get where they are by dint of hard work and a talent for digging out stories and wheedling information out of people. Those talents are the first requirements for their job and fluency in the language comes a very distant second. Some of the finest, most efficient reporters I’ve worked with have been people who could barely even speak English. The good thing was, they knew it and didn’t have any ego hassles about the desk rewriting their copy. They understood their limitations and, in the best-case scenarios, there was even a covert understanding that they would file their copies early so the desk would have more time to structure the language.

When it works that way, fine. The problem arises when some people refuse to accept that their writing is awkward or ungrammatical, and start interfering with what the desk is up to. It’s mind-boggling the number of such people there are, the ones who go on about their “style of writing” and who are encouraged in these delusions by equally clueless friends and relatives. (This is especially annoying because back in the days when I was doing clinical reportage-oriented articles, I would baulk and snap if a family member - or a PR person - said “what a well-written story”.) And when one of these sorts makes it to a relatively senior level, from where they can be hegemonist with deskies, well, that’s a recipe for trouble. It helps explain the level of copy-editing in most of our newspapers.

One valid argument is that while writing skills needn’t be a priority for reporters working in news, they are important for feature writers. Sometimes it does work that way: talented writers looking at a career in journalism more often than not gravitate towards features. But the lines do keep blurring; after all, it’s not like news reporters are recruited straight out of one gene pool while feature writers are drawn from another gene pool with superior writing skills, and then the two are kept separately in airtight compartments. There’s a lot of movement in journalism, job profiles keep changing and shifts often occur from one department to another.

Like I said earlier, this post doesn’t have a definite beginning or end, there’s plenty more one can say on the subject and I might keep adding to it as and when I feel like. Meanwhile, I can only hope there are even a few people in the profession with the inclination and skill to take up Chandrahas’s suggestion for contemplative essays on ice-cream selles, or stray dogs, or autorickshawdrivers.