Running thoughts on being published elsewhere...
I got an essay published in Fountain Ink!
Things have been slow on the ’Dispatch for the past months. But I kept myself busy. You cannot be caught sleeping in election season! You’re like a cow discovering untouched emerald pasture, you gotta be on your lawnmower timing, if you wanna write. It’s a fountain of fodder. But I also believe in praxis, time to time I try to get off the armchair and shake a leg, come rain, hail or heat.
So, I found myself volunteering for a pamphleteering drive to distribute pamphlets of the Constitution’s preamble across the city during the week of our 75th Republic Day. I went for some talks and discussions held at the Alternative Law Forum, I volunteered a bit of energy to Bahutva Karnataka (a civil society group), and I stuck my nose in on a couple of political events. The first being a meeting of the civil society groups with the Indian National Congress Lok Sabha candidate for Bangalore North, Rajeev Gowda, and the second being an Aam Aadmi Party protest rally organized in the wake of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in ‘Freedom Park’. Both events were more amusing than illuminating. And then ofc, there was all the shenanigans of trying to get the Congress candidate to visit our community, which didn’t pan out.
All stuff I’ll write, pontificate, opinionate and snark about.
But in the meanwhile, I was also pitching left and right to the more well-reputed long-form publications. Because like I explained to a friend once, at one level you do with crave the validation, the esteem and the captured audience of the more established, reputable journals. I was shooting from the hip. And lo’, the long form journal Fountain Ink responded to my overtures, and picked up the story of my Constitution preamble pamphleteering experience.
I’ve been to the moon and back. Now seeing my writing framed in a corner alongside the writing of others in the fabled long form journalistic canon feels great. And, yes it feels like that. Like a canon event
But it doesn’t feel like The Trench Dispatch.
For there is a journalistic style, even in the long form. From Fountain Ink to The Caravan to Himal Southasian, or even the New Yorker, New Lines, or The Atlantic, they have all got a certain Apollonian Associated Press kinda formality in their writing. A polish and a tint. It shines clear breaking through the idiosyncratic styles of individual editors, in the was the sentences premise and resolve themselves, in the grammar, in the immaculate clarity and precision of language.
When the editor sent me back the draft with the edit, it was magical in that it kept, perhaps even accentuated the clarity of essay. The readability was definitely grades higher. That’s the magic of the professional’s, I suppose.
All the drafts and self-edited efforts of the Dispatch feel like swimming in circles in a cesspool of confusing, hysterical gurgitation of words that require to be made readable. The nonchalance with which the editor’s feedback slid into my email, I don’t think I can clarify what I even felt.
But I observed some real knit-picky things, aesthetic choices, or editorial choices that I in my ignorance and arrogance would never allow. Not on the Dispatch. Take for example, me ending a section on my hesitation in distributing the Constitution preamble pamphlet at a puja, a religious function, I wanted it to go like:
I had an inkling that approaching them with the republic’s highest legal document would not only put them in a sour mood but also risk an episode of castigation.
In any case, nobody likes a proselytizer.
Instead it goes like:
I suspected that proferring them the republic’s founding document would not only crimp their style, but I was also risking castigation. Nobody likes a proselytiser unless it’s a message they want to hear.
“…unless it’s a message they want to hear.” I would never.
I like mic drops.
The phrase “…led the lady to lament…” became “…led the woman to lament…”. Now, perhaps, some discerning readers of the Dispatch may have picked up that yours truly is somewhat of a sucker for (broken) alliterations.
I have been reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, his coverage of the 1972 US presidential elections, serialized in Rolling Stone magazine. It has undoubtedly got Thompson’s voice, albeit after grueling rounds of edit by the Stone’s team to make it readable, given that he was notorious for being all over the place. But by then Thompson had a distinct voice, and back then Rolling Stone had an actually had some juice, back when they had a political edge.
The good thing about a socio-political publication like Fountain Ink is that they are likely to keep their political edge given that’s their lane in the writing trade. In the journalism business. They are all in a serious business. Earnest, pristine prose, with a kind of athletic alacrity in storytelling. And they keep the press rolling. On God, I say that it feels good to get the validation from such publications. Feels good to work with them.
It’s just that I wished to call the essay “Euphoria & Paranoia at a Constitutional Crossroads”, and it got christened “Constitution and community action”.
The Dispatch is earnest to me, it is serious business for me. My pig-headed opinions and infantile ideas on writing, turns of phrases, motifs, tropes, metaphors, literary devices are serious business to me.
I may pout if they are challenged.
That being said, I still feel super stoked about being published. I’ll continue to offer unsolicited pitches to publications I like from time to time, chase them, harangue them maybe.
To read “Constitution and community action”, click on the link here. But you gotta subscribe!