Passing The Baton: Experiences of an Editor

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

~Marguerite Duras, 1997.

After I became one of the chief editors at BSP a year ago, I wrote a private blogpost on my impression of it. The idea was to write another post at the end of the tenure and see what changed after serving it for another year to the best of my abilities.

This is that post¹. I have been procrastinating this post since January, slowly cherishing the diminishing hours for what I knew was inevitably nearing me - the end of my tenure. I opened the group and there it was: the official announcement of recruitment for the next team. “About time”, I thought to myself and fired up my word processor.

Baby steps

One of the first realisations that hit me as a chief editor was if I called a meeting then I was in-charge of it. If five people showed up, they would be expecting me to talk sense else I would be wasting six people’s time. I started preparing for my meetings, which kept me on my toes always, and projects afloat. Assignments and deadlines didn’t matter - if there’s work, it had to be done even if it meant going to bed at 3 AM. A team depended on what I did.

Delays

Delays are an inevitable part of BSP projects. It’s beyond any control - techie may get sick, journo may have an assignment deadline, professor doesn’t show up, design was bad, and so on; things go bad because chief eds cannot control all parameters of the environment they operate in. But I started observing patterns. Things can be made better if delays can be built into the schedule. I started making two timelines for projects - one that would be a lower bound of all things considered and a secret more realistic one. The target would then be to complete the project somewhere between these two expected times. This is how I kept my projects on track (for the most part) and completed them on time.

Voice of the campus?

Historically, BSP has been seen as a body that caters to a select few students and a narrow set of ideologies. A brief review of previous BSP publications indicated a severe shortage of coverage of student problems from all communities on campus. There may be other reasons for it but to me it seemed to stem from the lived experiences of the students who lead BSP and how those experiences were not inclusive of all that existed on campus. Being realistic, it is not possible to live through the experiences of (say) PwD student in IIT, but the sad part was that there was no attempt in BSP to try to understand and empathise with experiences other than their own.

Where is the information?

Someone rightfully told me that what BSP lacks is a network of covert informants. It was comical when members of BSP got to know about events on campus through non-BSP people. So, I started out building that network. A network built on trust. I knew it would be a very slow and steep climb but one cannot cite that reason and not start climbing at all! I started reaching out to people and just talked and listened. A number of earlier publications or attempts of publication (The room space issue publication, for example) were rooted in this idea - to build trust by being an accessible and vocal body.

Death of a child

Inquirer is BSP’s flagship journalistic magazine. Every edition tackles some “serious” issue pertinent to the student community. I really wanted to cover caste-based discrimination on campus and set out racking my head on how to go about doing it; it would be a very extensive project with multiple pieces that would have to come together in a grand crescendo. I started out educating myself about statistics and fairness and the application of ideas learnt in the class to a real social context. I had a team of ten dedicated, enthusiastic freshly recruited journalists working on the project. We met professors, interviewed members of the community, and started designing an extensive survey. I have a habit of working in silence so I don’t think many people noticed the amount of time and effort I put into this project; but sure enough, people who did notice realised the scale of the project.

It was little things like this that kept me going in the two month long effort that involved numerous interviews, extensive literature review, and multiple iterations of the survey itself. We released the form on September 6th IIRC and that’s when it was taken down. I got a call from a journalist at The Hindu and before I knew it, we were national news; on the front page of The Hindu.

The next few days went in anticipation (Will they allow it?), contemplation (What happens now?), and introspection (What have I done wrong?), a fight for what we stood for, and a dwindling hope that Inquirer would be resurrected. I submitted a 10 page long report on how we did what we did (thanks to my habit of documenting everything, this was a breeze) and we appealed to the Director. In the end, we lost. Inquirer was written-off after false hopes of a collaboration with the SC/ST cell. The hardest part was breaking the news to the team. I remember calling them for a Google meet and having a heartfelt conversation with them; some of them were sad, some were angry. Personally, I think we were not understood and even when we tried to open a channel of communication with the conflicting body, we were not duly listened to. It felt like the death of my child - who I had nurtured and nourished for three months.

Idealism vs realism

I must admit that back at home I was shielded from ideas of communal dissonance that existed between in the north. I have always lived in harmony with my non-Muslim friends who respected me and looked at me as their equals. Coming from a place where merit takes front-seat, it was a cultural shock when I landed up in Delhi and was exposed to the kind of hatred and misunderstanding that people harbour in their hearts on the basis of someone’s identity. I mean, I learnt about religious slurs that are used against Muslims here in Delhi, after twenty years of my existence. No doubt, these were foreign ideas that I had to deal with and honestly, I had little guidance. Stereotypes about certain groups abound and are apologetically used in conversations and narratives. Maybe, that is one reason why being a part of BSP has been so important to me - to make people realise the existence of viewpoints different from theirs and maybe give them an avenue to cultivate the emotional intelligence to accept and respect that.

To live for others, one step at a time

I was scrolling through Vox IITK’s insta page totally not hunting for ideas when I came across a “How the Mess functions” report. Perhaps we can do one on the IITD mess system also? I envisioned it to be a simple report on how the mess workers are paid and what the wage model is, annual increments and all. I estimated that it would be a one week project - asking a couple of people a couple of simple questions and a couple of journos drafting the report. But the project dragged on.

I’ll spare you the details of what we found in the mess report but just that there have been unaccounted measures that we suspect are costing the students more than they should pay for. I think the most heart-breaking part of the whole story was the fact that students who are supposed to represent the student body have taken on selfish and self-motivated objectives. PoR is seen as an avenue to bag an internship or a placement, not as a way to do good for the student community. Students are not doing their duties, their rightful duties that they have accepted as part of their PoRs. Any human institution will face inefficiencies and corruption. Thus, there is always another institution to keep it in check. Faculties, administration, the mess system, everything will eventually become corrupt if the people who are oppressed do not speak up. And the tragedy of the situation is that people who are responsible to speak up, don’t. Leaving the entire community ailing under the weights and costs, oblivious to the fact that they are being scammed every single day.

How many wrongs can I right?

I have tried so hard to do right. ~Cleveland, 1908

Maybe this sense of self-centeredness as opposed to community-centeredness, is not exclusive to IIT. I had to grapple with my conscience every single day. I would see something wrong and just stand in silence as a by-stander - after all, how many wrongs can I right? I would let one of my children bleed as I would go running to tend to another. It takes an army to defend a fort - the fort, which I believed stood for fundamental human rights but it seemed like I was alone. Some things worked out, some didn’t. That’s how things go. I learnt what I could from the ones that failed and quickly moved on to the next thing.

Personal reflections

When I became chief editor, the outgoing General Secretary told me one thing, “Do justice to the board”. We both share a deep love for the idea of BSP in our heads. It was my time to do my part in realising that idea. I don’t know how BSP has evolved but there were few signs - journos would approach me (especially people who were introverted) and tell me how they love the culture at BSP. There would be heartfelt messages on groups comparing how BSP is so much better than the other student bodies they are a part of. In hindsight, this kept me going because who else can be a better critic than one’s subordinates? My idea of running away from reality has been to throw myself at work and persevere (The ABC report, for example) and BSP kept me going through some of my hardest times, personally or otherwise. I have grown more humble and sensitive - on how to interact and talk to people and how to think about others.

What changed?

I have often asked the question: what for? Why bother to work so diligently at all? What good comes out of it? Does it even matter when people around you don’t really care? Students generally stay in college for four years and then leave so even if some passionate change-maker does manage to bring about reforms (which is already a gargantuan task for them), things would go back to being corrupt and wrong after they leave, undoing everything they did so why bother at all? The institute systematically resists changes to the status quo and anything that might jeopardise its set of objectives by subtly influencing student organisations. Any significantly big motion of change is immediately pacified by a well-oiled administrative system. I refuse to accept that changes cannot materialise if the students demand it. The problem is that students don’t know what they can do or they don’t want to. That’s where BSP should intervene.

The fault in our values

There’s a peculiar narrative out at large around election season - Jaayega isliye kaam kar raha hai (Wants to contest for a position that’s why they are working) - that highlights the incorrigibly flawed philosophy at the core of student politics at IITD. If I could do it again, I would do it all over again and perhaps with a greater passion and fervour.

Parting thoughts

What do I leave behind? To some, it might be a handful of posts on BSP’s website. My goal was always to be a role model for at least one of my juniors and even if they exhibit 10% of the passion that I have shown through the tenure, I would consider my tenure a successful one. I feel proud and grateful to write that I have touched more than just one life who look up to me today.

1: It might serve as a guide to future editors, a conduit to reminisce for past editors, or a common student’s window into the conscience of a troubled editor at a college media body.