Journalism's proud moment

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for economics. That's good news for Princeton University, where he teaches, but it's even better news for journalism because he's famous the world over as a columnist.

It is not every day that newspaper columnists are feted for their intellectual accomplishments. Krugman writes two columns a week for The New York Times, and is syndicated in many newspapers in India. That makes him the most prolific economics columnist in the world.

How many academics take the trouble to write columns? How many can quickly analyse developments as they unfold, and do it in a style that will not put off the non-specialist reader? University professors are too busy with their teaching and research to want to connect with a larger audience. Some are daunted by newspaper deadlines, some are lazy, and quite a few just can't write plain English.

Krugman has managed his dual role with great distinction: he writes for newspapers and simultaneously lectures on international affairs at the university. There's plenty academics and journalists can learn from him, and they can do it in the confidence that they might some day be considered for what many consider the highest honour in the world.

But to cut to reality... It would be foolish to compare Krugman to the average reporter who won't even revise his copy. The average journalist has earned the reputation of being a simpleton who cannot understand anything more complex than crime and municipal news. The idea that journalism and erudition can go together looks outlandish not just to outsiders, but even to some journalists! But that's not entirely the journalist's fault.

When Justice Manisana headed a board to fix wages for journalists, many newspaper managements, anxious not to pay bigger salaries, told him reporters and sub-editors ought to be compared with bank clerks, not college lecturers. People who ought to have known better expected little more than stenographer services from journalists. That was in the 1990s. Today, most journalists work on contract, and get higher salaries than those recommended by government wage boards.

Job seekers and interns at newspaper offices are unfamiliar with basic reporting and editing despite their spending years studying journalism. India has more colleges and institutes offering journalism than ever before, but something is seriously amiss: they just aren't imparting the right skills. To state the obvious, reporting and editing are the primary skills for any kind of journalism, all else is secondary. The exams ask students to define 'investigative journalism', 'caption', and 'headline'. Answering such questions is not the same as being able to deliver an investigative report, or write a caption and headline!

Reporting requires street-smartness and the ability to collate information from diverse sources. Editing requires an understanding of language and context. Print journalism calls for an advanced skill that is mostly overlooked: making copy simple, stylish and pleasurable to read. Ultimately, journalism is the art of making the complex comprehensible to everyone.

I recently leafed through the syllabus of a master's course in communication, and was surprised to find a module on how to cover international affairs. Ideally, if these courses were working, we would have had many Paul Krugmans in our midst!

An angry man called Jyoti

Obits are being written all over India for Jyoti Sanyal, the journalism guru who died in Kolkata last week. I had seen him every day for three years when he was in Bangalore, and for someone in his fifties, he looked young and fit. When I heard the news of his passing, I wondered how someone like him could have had a stroke. “It was his temper,” said C K Meena, who knew him closely as a colleague at Asian College of Journalism.

Meena (now a columnist for The Hindu), Vishweshwar Bhat (editor, Vijaya Karnataka) and I taught at ACJ when Jyoti was dean (1997-2000), and we often watched him rage against the ugly style that rules our English language newspapers. He certainly was an angry man, but the anger was more ideological than personal. He shouted at students who turned in clumsy copy, and flung insults that left them reeling. But a trainee just had to write one nicely worded story for him to fall in love with her (He mentored the boys with equal concern).

Jyoti blamed the bad English of the Indian newspapers on two influences. Indians, he believed, thought in their own tongues, and then translated their thoughts into English, which is why they don’t find expressions such as “I am having two brothers” wrong. Second, he was convinced the merchant language of the East India Company had overwhelmed Indians and left them incapable of clarity of thought and expression. Jyoti called it “baboo English” because it used “scraps of commercialese such as same/the same; the said letter; aforesaid letter; duly noted, and Kindly instead of please, and so on.”

When I first heard about Jyoti’s insistence on English that sounded like English and not like an Indian language, I thought he was one of those literal school-teacher types, obsessed with textbook correctness, and unable to look beyond it. I had discovered the kaleidoscopic beauty of Salman Rushdie’s prose, and had earlier enjoyed the bold Kannada-coloured English of Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura, and arrived at the position that Indians writing in English ought not to feel apologetic about bringing in their own cadences and idioms into English. But I soon realised Jyoti was bristling against something else altogether, and at one point he acknowledged my argument that English would be enriched, and not impoverished, if we applied our native imagination to it.

Looking back, Jyoti seems like a Naxal of the newspaper world, incensed not so much by personal injury as by the absence of a just system. And he carried himself around like an ideologue with his own idea of fashion, wearing oversized goggles, puffing away on a Wills Filter, and outfitted in jeans and cowboy-style zip-up boots.

When we published an obit for Jyoti in MiD DAY yesterday, we headlined it ‘Enemy of the cliché’. Ashish Mukherjee, the author, had almost ruined his chance of getting an ACJ seat when he said he wanted to become a journalist and fight for some great cause. Jyoti believed Ashish had “airy fairy” ideas about journalism, and decided to turn him away, but changed his mind at the last minute. Ashish came down from Delhi and and turned into one of Jyoti’s fervent disciples. He went back to work for Indian Express and CNN-IBN in that city.

Jyoti’s students now populate newspapers and TV channels across India, and are conscious they have the responsibility of carrying forward his crusade against shoddy writing. On their blog (http://acjbillboard.blogspot.com), they have been sharing stories about Jyoti. Elsewhere, Ravinder Kumar, editor of The Statesman when Jyoti wrote its style book, describes him as a man of style and great substance.

Here in MiD DAY, we bought copies of his book Indlish for all our journalists as soon as it hit the stands a year ago. We didn’t know it then, but our preference for it over The Economist Style Book had pleased Jyoti, and he had felt vindicated that a newspaper was trying to put his ideas into practice.

Jyoti didn’t teach me anything overtly, perhaps because he felt it would be indecorous to instruct a colleague, but I watched him at work, and picked up -- Ekalavya-like! -- writing and editing techniques that have proved invaluable in my journalistic career. I know this is belated, but thanks, Jyoti!