In Conversation With M Rajshekhar

You’ve been a writer and a journalist since the late-1990s. How has journalism itself changed and evolved over the last 20 years, especially in India? What impact has the rise of the Internet – with the accompanying waves of bloggers, vloggers, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagrammers and others – had on print media? Do you think print magazines and newspapers will still be around in another 10 years? If yes, what can these do to stave off the threat from Web-only publications?

Oh, man. This is a long answer. I am not sure I can give you a quick but comprehensive answer to this.

How has journalism changed? I cut my teeth on business reporting and so, if I was to compare the nineties and now, what would be the biggest changes I would see? I am not sure I see any large improvement/decay in aggregate output. We continue to be mediocre. Back then, there were some good publications/editors/reporters and lots which were pedestrian. Which is how things are even now. To be snide, that lot missed the Satyam story. This lot missed the IL&FS story.

The business dailies have weakened (I hold Business Standard as an exception to the general decay), the magazines are entirely irrelevant, but they have been supplanted by online startups like The Ken, Morning Context, ET Prime etc. This shift means critical stories keep getting done but there are significant accompanying costs.

One, with the startups following the subscription model, access to business reports – even investigative ones, which are written as a form of public good – has fallen. Sans reach, the outcome is a kind of defanged journalism. Two, almost every online newsroom in the country has a problem with office culture. The result? After a couple of years in these, young reporters end up burnt out or cynical. This comes with long-term costs – if they leave the profession, it has to replace the expertise they had built up; if they become cynical, it shows in their capacity to work through stories.

These processes of journalistic weakening are not playing out in a vacuum. Processes of expropriation and dispossession continue to evolve – like colonialism and neocolonialism, where the trade relations stayed the same but were just hidden better. Journalism, which has to keep an eye on these processes, has to keep pace. But the suboptimalities of our mainstream and alternative newsrooms kick in there. This point, of course, applies to all beats.

Will magazines/papers be around ten years later? That is simple, isn’t it? If they figure out a way to be relevant, they will survive. That is not a hard question to figure out, by the way. People in this country – businessmen and others alike – are beset by a bunch of problems. What are the informational problems they face – be it in better understanding this world or getting their concerns across to the government? If magazines start solving real problems, they will be fine. At this time, however, they are too disconnected.

What book are you currently reading? What kind of books do you generally enjoy reading?

I have just finished Nilanjana Roy’s Black River. This is noir set in Uttar Pradesh around the killing of a young girl. I read the book in two days, reading in every gap that showed up in the middle of work. Read the book and you will see so much of the ugliness that pervades our society – our wanton cruelty to animals; predatory elite; gender discrimination; people subsisting on the margins; the deliberate fanning of communal hatreds, the works. Having read the book, I am struck by how well Nilanjana understands the structures of emergent India. This book rings truer to me than a couple of other lit-fic I have read regarding our times. I was also struck by her portrayal of public institutions – like police, etc. They show up as they do in real life for most Indians – not as a malign presence as much as an absence. Ugly processes – the thinning of a forest; the bullying of minorities; what have you – play out entirely unchallenged. This is life without the state.

What do I read? Some fiction. Some non-fiction. Before Black River, I read Leonard Cohen’s biography. I am supposed to head into a reading break now. This is the end of the year – and I want to spend the days ahead sans too much stimuli. A detox of sorts. The world forces an impoverishing strait-jacket on us. As a reporter, I scowl endlessly about how much of my attention goes into the petty processes shaping our here and now – a govt pulled down here; a project violating environment laws there. For some weeks in the year at least, I would like to slip that straitjacket and treat the brain to grander ideas. And so, I want to read a few good books – books that infuse wonderment, I think. What will those be? I do not know. I have Piers Vitebsky’s book on Siberia – his book on the Soara tribe of Odisha had been stunning and so, I am looking forward to The Reindeer People. I have Singing Saltwater Country. I have dozens of similarly magnificent, meaty books – books that pack epiphanies and add vastly to our understanding of the world – clamouring to be read.

Any favourite authors? Any favourite Indian authors? Any writers/authors whom you consider your role models and who have inspired you to write the way you write?

Gosh. This is another very large question. I am going to give you a short answer. Many favourite authors – those who asked intellectually ambitious questions that filled large gaps in the our understanding of the world – and gave us epiphanies that left us gasping (Mark Elvin, Richard Grove, Janet Browne, Dov Ospovat, Jan Vansina…); those who asked urgent questions and answered them incontrovertibly (Ludo De Witte, Neil Sheehan, Karen Dawisha, Michela Wrong, Manoj Mitta, K Balagopal…); those who helped us make sense of human history (CLR James; Tzvetan Todorov; Zygmunt Bauman…); those one read while developing one’s sense of the world and, ergo, owes a debt to (David Halberstam, Robert Pirsig, Joseph Heller…).

And then, there is fiction. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. The opening lines of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible – “A glide of snake belly on branch.” Or Meghadootam, which shows how well Kalidasa knew the geography of this country. Or Segu. One could just keep on going.

In India, how easy or difficult is it for new authors to get published?Is it sufficient to have a good story idea and great writing skills, or do new authors necessarily need big money in order to get published?

I think it’s a fairer field than that. I got lucky, conning Karthika into liking my draft. But a bunch of my friends who do not have big money – Vidya Krishnan, Rukmini S, Jaideep Hardikar, Suchitra Vijayan, Neha Sinha and so many others – have published their books as well. What all of them have in common is painstakingly-built domain expertise. If you look at Nilanjana’s book – which is fiction – painstaking observation is laced through its pages as well.