Even as the year 2023 ended and the world at large celebrated New Year's Day, the wars and conflicts raging in the world did not stop. They continued into the new year, erasing any celebrations from the lives of those running from death and destruction raining from the skies.
At Outlook, we acknowledge this and feature voices from Palestine amid Israel's ongoing war on the Gaza Strip in our anniversary issue. We feature testimonials from Palestinians across the spectrum of arts and literature and bring the stories beyond the numbers and statistics. Editor Chinki Sinha writes that the act of bearing witness is a primary responsibility of a journalist. With the issue, titled 'We Bear Witness', we share the many stories of resistance and resilience of Palestine.
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Sinha writes that we brought out the year-end issue on Palestine to tell the people who are suffering that we bear witness.
"The act of bearing witness is a primary responsibility of a journalist. That very act has been replaced by cacophony and othering of people in the media. We weren’t on the ground but for weeks, we searched social media for people who were posting about their lives in war. We reached out to them with the hope that they will talk to us. We remain grateful to them and I am also in awe of our reporters and everyone in the team who kept at it despite the odds. There were times when we would write to dozens of people and receive not a single response. But we never abandoned hope and we never abandoned the story. It is wartime. And all wartimes must be recorded," writes Sinha.
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Our anniversary issue on Palestine was not an exception, but a norm. In our anniversary issues every year, we cover the people who often get lost in the cacophony and othering that's become all too mainstream in the news cycle. Our anniversary issues are our way of saying we care about them.
In 2022, we brought out the issue titled 'Below The Line' on the lives of workers in the film industry. While a few actors feature on the posters and a few names of directors and producers are splashed on it, there are a host of workers who make the film possible. The issue was dedicated to such unsung workers. In the issue were the stories, both nostalgic highs of the yesteryears as well as the travails of the present, of sound designers, location managers, stuntmen, make-up artists, linemen, and a host of other workers who form the cogs of the wheels of the film industry.
In 2021, we brought out the issue 'My Dear Apocalypse' on the world around us that was in the grips of Covid-19 pandemic. As the second wave of the coronavirus left the nation grasping for breath and dying on streets amid overflowing crematoriums. It was the closest the world came to an apocalypse in the living memory. The Covid-19 was not the only apocalypse though. In the issue, we also covered about the draconian law Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), the lives of the marginalised, and the long winter in Kashmir, a region stripped of its autonomy that several natives held non-negotiable and downgraded from a state to a union territory with electoral politics in indefinite suspension.
