Busking on journalism’s footpath
Recently there was news of an extraordinarily gifted 12-year-old with multiple university degrees, scheduled to be a medical doctor when he turns 18.
In that period of time, if my condition as freelancer does not improve I may need a psychiatrist.
Assuming that the youngster elects to study psychology and becomes a psychiatrist, he could be among the people I turn to for help. A 53-year-old treated by a 18-year-old sounds engaging but how effectively understood the fifty-something would be is debatable. Don’t we need some life and living on both sides for the transaction to appear realistic? Isn’t there a fundamental difference between learning a subject and applying it?
There was a time when I would have emphatically said: YES. Not any more, for the world is not in my grasp and, like Facebook shaping our lives even as it debates whether a `like’ button should be balanced by a `dislike,’ a lot of imperfect solutions run my world because a tide of money, attitude and corporate power can have it so.
When you have lived long you know that like and dislike are two sides of the same coin just as we have said yes and no for as long as we remember. The long term consequences of less evolved idioms usurping our communication for commercial gain hasn’t yet captured our attention although we have had one high profile journalist quit Twitter citing its limitations.
In the age of technology and commerce, all this and more will happen and courtesy marketing, none of it will ever honestly say why it succeeded. Mercifully, there is journalism’s footpath; I can busk about my fading, hope to see a few coins in my cap.
One of the depressing aspects of ageing in today’s world is the low value ascribed to work experience. I became a journalist in 1991 and resigned my last job in 2006, choosing to freelance thereafter. A decade later, I swallowed my pride and acknowledged the difficulty of freelancing. I looked around for jobs and soon realized that ageing in life and working through it both went against me. The position I last held in 2006, after 15 years in the field, is nowadays awarded to people with less than 10 years of experience.
There is also no dearth of designations. Every publication has impressive designations resulting in a small army of senior sounding young journalists. I shouldn’t complain. Fifteen years to reach the designation I last held was considered fast in those days and fast just got faster. But it is not without its accompanying questions for if you become editor earlier and still earlier, what do you evolve to? There is also that question – what is somebody an editor for?
And if you want none of the above and simply seek space to sit your old self down and write, designation or no designation, it is still unsettling for the system. What does the system know of evolution? Generically speaking - not just about journalism - I believe there is an unsaid convenience in the widespread partiality for the young in jobs. Fresh and yet to be bored, the young buy into jobs. Older and experienced, and it is difficult not to be bored by the monotony. Not having a job doesn’t mean you have poor brains. Maybe they just don’t have a job for those bored with the paradigm.
I have often wondered what the ageing journalist can do in times of journalism smashed. I use the word `smashed’ because there have been waves of smashing in the past three decades or so. The first wave was the MBAs. Lauded as mavericks and entrusted with the media’s business model, they turned journalism into advertising. Newspapers transformed themselves from being an aspiration to a product. Sales improved.
The next wave was technology. It made access to publishing technology widespread and retail, effectively making many journalists overnight. Countering it is tough. While journalism’s open architecture is bad for the livelihood, it is invigorating for the craft. Not to mention the fact that doing what one wants to do and learning in the process is a more realistic university for the craft than a degree obtained for professional identity.
Other waves of smashing include the consequences of the media’s questionable conduct ranging from the patrons and privileges it entertained to sometimes plain arrogance. We became privileged, haughty, and hollow. That’s why, when technology allowed them the chance to be journalist-like, few passed up the opportunity.
In the popular imagination there are as many journalists as there are Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs. Everybody is `media.’ Much to journalists’ dismay, being a journalist is no longer special. However, truth be told, we have had some good writing on social media so to reserve the ` journalist’ tag only for those in the established media would be questionable.
One day amid my freelance work, I came across an interview with one of the most talented rock guitarists around. He said that, unlike in days gone by when talent was spotted and picked up from pubs and night clubs by an industry that knew where talent gathered and went looking for it, currently it is what survives the rigours of reality TV shows and their ilk that gets to be music.
Many genuinely talented musicians and singers choose to keep off this circus. Some have resolutely shunned the limelight to perform in small clubs or on the street waiting for a patron who doesn’t dilute the craft or crowd it out with other distractions. In today’s times, if you want to really see the talent there is in music, you have got to look in more places than one. You have got to look outside the limelight as well.
This is true of journalism too if what matters is content. Where the above example departs from journalism is in how music recognizes music by sound anywhere, despite the ways of its industry, while journalism still hasn’t got around to noticing its craft beyond personalities, professional addresses, and an employed state of existence.
As one busks, it is a correction phase without any idea of what might lie ahead. How can you have any idea of what lies ahead when technology itself has no idea where it is going, except what profitability demands that it do next? You can’t build an edifice on a shifting foundation or, to be more precise, a foundation that is shifting people’s media habits.
The good thing about those in journalism who have chosen correction is that they are facing the future, not the past. They face the flux, not contrived stability. Some of them conclude that the only way ahead for the craft is akin to becoming heritage. As seeped in the past as heritage may seem, the very search for new paradigms of sustenance is futuristic. That’s the unsaid uniqueness of ageing too. For all the uncertainties and wrinkles that gather, you are still walking with time, not against it.
I suspect I may tell my 18-year-old psychiatrist: ``You are a prodigy because we aren’t bionic enough. What if our minds lived forever in replaceable bodies, gathering experience? What if I wasn’t 53 but 530? Your 18 years would still be sufficient to treat me?’’
I suppose he would tell me what a tyrannical world that would be, a world of editors refusing to die. Meet Mr. so and so, he has been editing this publication for the last 500 years. His mind, a bundle of data in a machine at the centre of an information inflow; he edits and prioritizes super-quick and in a world more automated than ours, publishes with no staff. At that point, I see patient and psychiatrist trading debate for a cup of tea. Hours later, as the psychiatrist walks home, he drops a coin in a busker’s cap; hopefully, he makes it a daily practice.
The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.