Open up when  the world shocks you

2016 shocked. And what a task it was to deal with the shocks.

When social and moral orders change dramatically, the job of a journalist becomes more important and more difficult than ever before. I faced a very small part of that challenge.

On a personal level, there are antidotes to such shocks. Open up to the little perfections of your family, friends and the people you meet and interact with often. Open up, fully, to understand the emotion of another person, however flawed that emotion may be. Open up to relationships you have not fully understood before. Open up to awkward dichotomies and opposites. 

Everybody agrees 2016 was worse than most years in recent history. Collective trauma was palpable. Let me not get into the specifics, we all know what happened—who won, who lost, who left the world with big holes, and who stood in serpentine queues outside public sector banks the longest. 

The brilliant writers in this issue will help you make sense of the year better than me. I want to talk about anger, reason and emotion. When forces much larger than us—governments and militia, media conglomerates and voter groups, the untrammelled but short-lived power of the social media—violate beliefs that we have embraced and internalized after years of observing, questioning, and feeling, there comes an anger that gnaws at you beneath the walking, eating, driving and mingling, beneath the business of life. This anger is also too easy to vent today. It streams instantly. We have talked a lot this year about the world, shared each other’s posts, disagreed with each other using reason and emotion, and at times gone completely quiet on each other. The liberal echo chamber was more clamorous than ever before—little of liberal discourse disseminated to make a difference to the world. Read Salil Tripathi’s essay on page 7 for more on the crisis of liberalism. 

For journalism, this year threw up challenges we had not foreseen. And the end to these challenges is nowhere in sight. People hated us and questioned our relevance. This year’s repercussions will unfold over the next few years, and we will need to constantly keep ourselves relevant. How do we do it? There is no one answer that, but one foolproof way is to continue telling stories that reveal lives which the world’s big events affect the most, but which remain in the background as alternative or parallel stories—stories that connect dots far away from each other, stories that matter for reasons other than shareability and traffic numbers. 

My mistrust of binary orders—national and anti-national, left and right, Nehru and Patel, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati—saved my year. 

That leaves me with the exhilarating ductility of the arts. The arts can best defy binary orders. Freedom of expression is always under threat in India. This year, there were way too many instances, and thankfully, the outcry against censorship was much louder too. 

I revisited the works of my grandfather—a poet and essayist who wrote only in Assamese, spoke in both Assamese and English, and taught all his life in English. He wrote about the anti-immigrant students’ movement in Assam, exposing its narrow boundaries and bravado, about the difference between saints and kings, in gentle satire, about the town of his birth and the Calcutta of the 1920s. His words revealed my childhood (spent with him) to me in new ways. I read Malayalam author K.R. Meera (Hangwoman, The Gospel Of Yudas) and Kannada author Vivek Shanbhag (Ghachar Ghochar) in translation—to be convinced yet again that the regional is universal, and there is no one authentic “global" narrative. 

The works of Raúl Zurita, the Chilean poet and artist, came to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. I am visiting the biennale soon, at least to wade through the waters Zurita uses in his installation to give us a semblance of the pain of refugee life. One does not know if one will feel anything at all doing that—after all, the millions of images of Syrian refugee children that we have consumed through half of 2016 have already conditioned us. But Zurita is the one who said, “If poetry ends, the dream is dead," and I want to believe him. 

I am on page 123 of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian—yet to realize the entire effect the book will have on me, but again, the universal in it works its magic. An extreme human life takes me closer to a society and culture that I have perhaps imagined as “the other".

Manoj Bajpayee’s S.R. Siras in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh is the best film performance of 2016. Delicate, haunting and deeply emotional, some of the film’s moments stayed with me through the year, and they will for many years to come. There are many shades to the character’s beauty and vulnerability, and all these shades had some truth in them. 

My five-year-old daughter made real friends this year, braved a painful injury and tried to explain to me why only one boy in her class could defeat her in racing. I say what Aamir Khan so triumphantly said in Dangal, the year’s biggest and most fulfilling crowd-pleaser, “Mhaari chhoriyaan chhoron se kum hain ke (Are our girls any less than our boys)?" 

I am armed to take more shocks and aftershocks in 2017.

For now, let’s not miss the party. Wish you a happy new year. 

Sanjukta Sharma

Editor