My articles and columns have been called many things — pompous rubbish, mental masturbation, crap, brilliant, insightful to name but a few — but never have they been termed “too cool for this paper”.
That was the term used by one editor to describe one rather flippant piece written by me on champagne. So what does it say of the time we live in, when papers discard articles on the grounds that they are ‘too good’.
When I was in Bahrain I bemoaned the lack of skill among its newspaper writers. There were of course exceptions: Les Horton’s daily column ranged from readable to extremely readable, but never was it unreadable; the same went for Frankie and Keith Fernandez (not related). The rest, however, was absolute drivel, and not even of the verbose kind, just the sort of writing that makes you want to walk up to the writer and slap them silly.
My columns of course were according to my girlfriend “complete shite” and “hopelessly long-winded meanderings of a delusional male”. She, unfortunately, is still my girlfriend and arrives in Mumbai next month.
I came to Mumbai expecting to be spoilt with skill when it came to columns and basic reportage. “My big fear,” I once told Keith in Bahrain, “is that [in Mumbai] I will be dumped into a well of talent and find my own unable to match-up.”
Thankfully, that fear has now been dispelled as swiftly as a harlot with bad technique. Now there’s a different question: are you too good to be a journalist?
I certainly think not. The better you are the more exposure you should get. I still cling to that anachronistic maxim that believes readers still enjoy good writing, and in some cases, I have been proven right.
There are, I must hasten to admit, some very good writers in Mumbai’s newspapers: There’s Ayaz Memon, Vir Sanghvi, CP Surendran, Jug Suraiya, R Jaganathan, and a few others. But they are the warhorses of the industry (at times I like to believe they’re Trojan horses from whose belly shall emerge battalions of talent to destroy the mediocrity personified by my mental Troy).
But I may not be the first person to feel the hammerfall of mediocrity and its minions. Some very good writers like Philip Chacko, Noel Figuerado and Kalpana Swaminathan simply stopped writing, because — I reckon — they knew the content of their pieces would not pass the mediocrity test. Others like R Mahadevan and Sabina Gurudev were swallowed up by the anonymity of the Internet.
While the UK and US boast names like Oscar Humphries, Thomas Friedman, Simon Jenkins, Rachel Abramovich, Mark Kermode and Charlie Brooker, I pine for writers of a similar ilk to adorn the well-designed pages of Mumbai newspapers.
There was a saying in Bahrain journalism circles: “The only way to defeat mediocrity is to strive for sheer ineptitude.” It seems to be a saying that’s doing the rounds in Mumbai as well.
The reportage is still pretty good, but it is the features that suffer most. And this I blame, in both the Middle East and Mumbai, on the continuing rise of Vox Pop journalism, fondly known as a ‘he-said-she-said’ article.
“Quotes do not an article make,” an old hack once told me. But the prevailing philosophy seems to be “bad quotes an imminently publishable article do make”.
The shuddering grapevine of the modern media, reassures me that this is typically a Mumbai phenomenon and that Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai are still vibrant in their literary literacy.
I certainly hope so, because the day I begin to look at Mideast newspapers with longing is the day I will hang myself with a string of words that say: “He went to find a like mind, and couldn’t find a single mind he liked.”
As for my girlfriend, she’ll probably consider Mumbai journalism the pinnacle of good writing, turn to me and say: “See! This shit I can read, your crap is meant for two idiots lacking lives.”
I wonder if I should be readying my string.
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