Society

All The Things We Were

Beyond ready labels like ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ or ‘left-of-centre’ to the nuances and specifics

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All The Things We Were
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If we begin with the presumption that ‘journalists are not ideological eunuchs,’ then the next question that arises is: what is the belief-system underpinning Outlook’s existence for the last 15 years? Rather than using ready labels like ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ or ‘left-of-centre’, it may be helpful to grapple with the nuances and specifics of what we are. Let’s explore that, first, through three quotes by three eminent writer-journalists.

Quote one: British journalist John Pilger in his introduction to Tell Me No Lies, a volume on investigative journalism, quotes a reader’s letter that Edward Smith Hall gave prominence to in the launch issue of his weekly, Sydney Monitor, in 1826. Hall was someone who gave Australia its three basic liberties: freedom of the press, representative government and trial by jury. The letter, describing the function of a journalist, says he is an “inveterate opposer (rather) than a staunch parasite of government”.

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Quote two: Soviet dissident Yevgeni Yevtushenko said in his A Precocious Autobiography: “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”

Quote three: James Thurber of the New Yorker, in his eccentric essay, ‘My Fifty Years with James Thurber’, speaks about his boyhood: “His gold-rimmed glasses forever needed straightening, which gave him the appearance of a person who hears somebody calling but can’t make out where the sound is coming from. Because of his badly focused lenses, he saw not two of everything, but one-and-a-half. Thus, a four-wheeled wagon would not have eight wheels for him, but six. How he succeeded in preventing these two extra wheels from getting into his work, I have no way of knowing.”

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Three Layers

In the extrapolation and application of these three quotes is contained the character of Outlook. In the spirit of the reader’s letter, the magazine has managed to be contrarian and irreverent rather naturally; it has also broken eerie silences many a time, and has always been able to laugh, Thurber-style, at itself; been utterly contemptuous of self-importance and retained a genuine sense of wonderment at having survived three turbulent half-decades.

To support the admittedly loaded claim to being contrarian, the average (and often angry) reader will be able to cite innumerable instances, beginning with the Kashmir poll we conducted in our first issue, in October ’95, which put the spotlight on human rights abuses and political aspirations in the Valley. The decibels were even higher when India tested an N-bomb; on Gujarat and Godhra; on Pakistan; on the situation of the Indian Muslim; the Parliament attack; on Taslima Nasreen; on Ayodhya; on the IPL; and, most recently, on the Maoist debate.

Readers’ letters have played their part in fuelling this contrarianism. In the first half-decade of Outlook (October 11, 1999), a reader (Sherna Gandhy from Pune) in response to the cover story ‘Do we really need a government?’ pointed out: “I augment my one measly hour of municipal water a day with costly tanker water. It’s not always potable, so I’ve a purifier. An inverter helps me tide over power cuts and poor garbage collection forced us to begin our own vermiculture project. Why indeed do we need a government?” Middle-class stories like this one spring from an understandable aversion to politics; they also found echo in a cover story in which we asked ‘Why the **** should we pay taxes?’ (April 2001). This was an Outlook circling round the centre rather than stagnating at a predictable point on the liberal-left. Maybe it is only after 2005 that we really began to live up to the charge some readers levelled at us, of being “bleeding-heart radicals”.

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Breaking silences appears second nature. The match-fixing story; the Kargil intelligence reports; the revealing of Dawood Ibrahim’s Karachi address; the Scorpene expose and phone-tapping may have been the stand-out moments, but there were other relatively smaller occasions that were no less significant. For instance, the bludgeoning prose used to speak of Reliance in January 1996 when the ‘duplicate share’ and ‘insider trading’ controversies surrounded the corporate giant:

“There has never been an Indian company like this. In a country where ‘business ethics’ is considered a contradiction in terms, where mutterings about the ‘business-political nexus’ raises only a few tired eyebrows today, the Reliance group continues to draw extreme responses. From the creator of unequalled wealth for lakhs of shareholders to Devil incarnate, an amoral behemoth which has brutally subverted the nation’s politico-economic system to have its cake and devour it, at every opportunity it has got.” We came back to ask in December 2004: ‘Are the Ambani brothers taking 35 lakh people for a ride?’ Earlier, we blew the lid on backroom dealmaking in Vajpayee’s PMO. 

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Coming to the third aspect of the Thurber-style, the best place to find a generous sprinkling of this would be the Delhi diaries. Sample the last item in the latest issue (October 25, 2010), titled ‘So Much for Us’, in which Vinod Mehta writes: “At Chennai airport, a gentleman came up to me, shook my hand and said how much he enjoyed watching me on TV. When I asked him if he had heard about Outlook, he looked puzzled. ‘Outlook, which channel shows that?’ I quickly moved away.”

Go back to the item ‘Duffers vs Toppers’ in the very first Delhi Diary (October 18, 1995), in which the same writer says: “Recently, I was invited back to my old school in Lucknow which was celebrating its 150th anniversary. I was informed that I had been chosen as one of the distinguished Martinians.... I was anything but distinguished in my school days. In fact, academically I was something of a disaster and close to a joke figure. There were others who were formidably bright and it was assumed that these gentlemen would make it big in the world. Alas, life is cruel. With a few exceptions, precisely the opposite has happened. The ‘duffers’ in a sense prospered while the ‘toppers’ ended up in tea estates.”

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This deep-chuckle brand of humour has also been expressed, since last year, through the Secret Diary column. In it, the fictional Amar Singh says: “And, yes, I also have a movie project—an expose of the fashion industry with eight songs and eight chases on toy cars all shot on the ramp. Its working title: The Devil Wears Jaya Prada”; a fictional Sonia Gandhi asks: “And why is Modiji raking up my foreign origins even after I have granted that ‘uthappam’ was a precursor to the ‘pizza’?” In sum, by trying to extract the essence of the magazine through three broad directions, all we are trying to say is that Outlook replicated no standard recipe, but created its own formula, necessitated by historical compulsion, conviction and also by competition.

Three Half-Decades

I referred to “three half-decades” at the beginning. Like the three layers, this uncommon division of time is relevant to Outlook’s existence. Each half-decade has meant one big challenge. (Some challenges have spilled over to the next block, though, and will be with us in the future.) In the first half-decade, from 1995 to 2000, the challenge was economic survival; in the next half it was political survival and now, even as we would like to think we are cruising, we are forced to contemplate technological survival in an iPad era.

In that eyeball-grabbing, attention-seeking initial phase, we shocked and awed: In September 1996, in a cover story on sex trends in the ’90s, we announced: “If sexual revolution is taking place in India, its guerrillas are women.” We pioneered an investigative survey by Outlook staffers to pick MPs with criminal cases. Mind you, this was much before it became mandatory for people contesting polls to declare their assets and file affidavits of pending criminal cases. In July 1998, we carried out a freak public experiment by swallowing the Viagra pill. And yes, we got Arundhati Roy to say “I secede” before she said other things.

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The cover graphics cried out for attention in a different way: check out the Sonia-Mona Lisa cover in May 1997; the Bofors boomerang cover with Sonia’s eyes popping out in February 1998; Sitaram Kesri as ‘villain’ in January ’98; Vajpayee as ‘Mr Flop’ in November 1998 and again Sonia as Ms Clueless in August 1999.

By the time Outlook stepped into its second half-decade, the BJP-led NDA regime was firmly ensconced. The subterranean tension, for an avowedly secular magazine, with a new regime founded on communal principles—‘Unfinished Task’ (December 18, 2000) and then four back-to-back Gujarat covers in December 2002—was evident. It had come to power with a majoritarian agenda after pulling down Babri Masjid and for us the parivar was constantly news—‘Defenders of the Faith’ (February 21, 2000); ‘Sangh Shock’ (March 27, 2000); ‘Loony Right’ (November 4, 2002). Outlook did try for a short period to construct a genuine right-of-centre, pro-reform position minus saffron hatred (‘Reforms: At Last Some Resolve’, February 7, 2000; ‘Ten Years of Reform’, June 25, 2001; ‘8 on 10’ for Yashwant Sinha’s budget in March 2001) but in the end, became unconvinced by the positions it was taking in a deeply polarised political and economic milieu. It moderated its enthusiasm for economic liberalisation, and then went even further, exposing the nexus between big money and the most important office in the nation, the PMO. This led to a frontal attack on Outlook. As a consequence of two covers that we did in a space of a couple of weeks (‘Rigging the PMO’, March 5, 2001, and ‘The PM’s Achilles Heel’, March 26, 2001), which essentially looked at how a clutch of business houses and individuals were setting the economic agenda of the nation, a vindictive government unleashed I-T and Enforcement Directorate raids on Outlook’s owners.

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What of the last half-decade, and technological challenges? Outlook has had to survive in an era of screaming, 24-hour TV news channels; and at a time when a broadband connection has become commonplace among the people it wishes to reach. In 2000, there were only 2 million internet users, by 2006 it became 21 million and in September 2009 about 71 million people were accessing the Net; of them 52 million were termed active users. Their growing visibility is evident from the fact that most reactions to Outlook’s print stories are generated on its website. There is a looming sense that this is the future, at least an inalienable part of it.

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Meanwhile, global recession, which heralded the death, distress or sale of several prestigious print publications in the US, has disseminated a stern message. One report said nearly 400 magazines folded in 2009. Businessweek was sold to Bloomberg and Newsweek is up for sale. The talk is that technology may offer a via media, although nobody has been able to crack the means to monetise the web as yet. We may want to assure ourselves that we are far behind the US in this respect, but perhaps not. No doubt, Indian readership has grown incrementally, and this is the only market in the world where print thrives. But we can’t pin our future hopes on that because the dynamic of technology is unpredictable—and we are not all that behind the rest of the world, technologically. So, what technological interfaces a print publication like Outlook should build is a question we can’t afford to ignore. Interestingly, though, in the last half-decade, Outlook has focused on the consequence of economic and technological progress in India. It has tried to vigorously capture the chasm that exists between India shining and the Indian in shambles.

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The Mar 11, ’02 cover on Gujarat riots started a series of reports 

Three Predictions

Outlook is not given to soothsaying. In fact, it has had a bitter experience with its poll predictions, which it has got badly wrong on occasion (‘Photo Finish’, December 9, 2002, and ‘NDA Shining’, April 19, 2004). However, three prescient predictions do pop up in our back issues. One was contained in our Ayodhya opinion poll in the June 30, 2003, issue, in which we asked important questions: “Do you think prolonging the Ayodhya issue will hurt Muslim interests?” Nearly 64 per cent said ‘Yes’. “How do you favour solving the Ayodhya dispute?”—52 per cent said through ‘negotiated settlement’. “Do you think Muslims should gift the Babri Masjid site to Hindus?” An overwhelming 89 per cent said ‘no’. This was when the NDA regime was in power. Compare this to the opinion that exists now, seven years later (‘Angry & Anxious’, October 18, 2010). Remarkably similar.

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In February 28, 1996, a good eight years before Manmohan Singh became prime minister, we asked: “Should Manmohan be prime minister?” It was an opinion poll again, for which we spoke to senior business executives and economists. One of the opinions said: “Manmohan Singh is a neta more interested in the dollar than in the kisan.”  Also, in March 1998, when speaking of prospective Congress prime ministers, we said: “The Left Front could object to his candidature on the ground that he is an IMF man.” Early forebodings of the spectacular falling out between Manmohan Singh and the Left?

A third prediction is yet to be tested. In September 2000, we wrote an exclusive report on the contents of the Asia 2025 study conducted by the US under-secretary of defence (policy), in which futuristic became ballistic: “The United States of America uses its B-2 bombers in the year 2012 to launch conventional air-strikes to destroy Pakistani nuclear facilities in a bid to prevent the nukes from falling into the wrong hands. The extraordinary US action follows an unsuccessful Indian conventional attack on Pakistani nukes, and a retaliatory Pakistani nuclear strike against Indian border forces. This sparks the disintegration and disappearance of Pakistan, and creation of an expanded Indian Confederation or Superstate.”

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Well, 2012 is a good year away. We’ll get back to you on how accurate that was!

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Our May 2010 story on phone-taps caused a Parliament uproar

Three Lakh Words

The last word, obviously, has to go to Arundhati Roy, whose writings are seen as significantly defining the Outlook spirit, especially in the last half-decade. She has written nearly 26 essays, which measure over two lakh words. She is sure to reach the three-lakh mark very soon. Many people have read her despite the great length of her writings. Some have agreed with her completely. Many have agreed with short and long caveats. And a large number have felt outraged by her views. Outlook has even been accused of ‘outsourcing’ radicalism to her. Even those who threatened to ‘unsubscribe’ if she is printed again, we bet, will take a sneak peek.

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Arundhati began her journey as a polemicist with the magazine when she wrote the ‘End of Imagination’ piece in August 1998. Her latest work, on the state of the nation and the need to imagine an order beyond capitalism and communism, was in September 2010. She deserves all credit for single-handedly reviving interest in the institution of the public intellectual, and the relevance of the pamphlet. In the many debates that Arundhati’s essays have propelled, people have passionately gone back to European and American masters of the art of pamphleteering. In one such coffee-house discussion in Bangalore after ‘Walking with the Comrades’ (March 29, 2010) was published, Orwell’s 1937 classic A Road to Wigan Pier, written when a cloud of Fascism hung over Europe, was picked up for comparison.

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However fair or unfair the act of comparing and the choice of the Orwellian piece was, it was agreed during the course of the discussion that Arundhati, though not as lucid as Orwell, was as compelling. But a close reading suggested that Orwell offered a fair idea of the alternate, and a sense of the achievable in his writing. In Arundhati’s work, it was said, anarchism (or ‘principled anarchism’ in the Chomskyan mould), mingled with a liberal dose of nihilism, ruled. It was also said that her prose was punctuated with what Orwell calls ‘intense self-consciousness’. During the debate, questions arose: Why has Arundhati failed to recognise that tribals are gunpowder for the revolutionary war of the Maoists? Why did her essays appear like an individual’s rant against the state? Where is the community? Whom does she represent and whom can she actually represent?

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Finally, an interesting passage was read out from Road to Wigan Pier in which Orwell makes a distinction between two varieties of socialists: “On the one hand you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilisation down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that.” Which one is Arundhati? Or is she is neither of them? History’s judgment is still open. Meanwhile, let the debate continue.

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