From Maggi to Modi

Writing an introduction for Shiv Visvanathan is a tough business. Author, professor, sociologist, public intellectual — he starts his day as one, and ends it as another. So to spare us the challenge, we asked the man himself, which one he’d like us to pick. In response, he asks, “Why can’t I be all ” But even with his penchant for juggling so many things at once, Shiv admits that if there is a tag that he prefers more than the rest, it is that of a ‘journalist’. “It is the perfect storytelling medium,” he says, even as he rues the lack of recognition for this field among his colleagues in academia.

He further points out that it is indeed the journalist in him that has to be credited for his latest book Theatres of Democracy: Between the Epic and the Everyday — a collection of his several columns and essays, compiled and edited by fellow academic professor Chandan Gowda of Azim Premji University.

The book is a collection of his writings over the past 20 years. The writings and essays cover a range of topics, which Shiv says are contemporaneous not just to their time of writing, but even to today’s age. “I’ve written on a lot of things, from Maggi to Modi or even Salman Khan. But I largely take from the three things that keep us occupied on a daily basis — politics, sports and cinema. All of these are similar in many ways in that they are like games, each with rules of their own. They shape our cultural landscape and the idea of ‘democracy’.”

The name of the book too, says Shiv, takes from the same idea. “These fields are all theatres where a variety of things play out, each different from the other. From politics to culture and cinema, there are a hundred different ways of doing democracy in India and that is what the book brings out.”

Telling us about the advantage of writing as a journalist, Shiv says, “I feel that journalism combines literature and sociology. That is why it is no surprise that many great sociologists or anthropologists have had their roots in journalism. The most important thing that journalists do, and academicians don’t is that they ‘trespass’ into different fields, and by trespassing they bring these disciplines closer. Its highlight is that it is stingy and focused on what one has to say and even more so its tremendous immediacy and reach. It offers the chance of being on the direct receiving end of criticism.”

But more than the advantages that the field offers, it is the thrill, says Shiv, that attracted him to journalism. “What many see as constraints, I see as challenges. Initially, when I was given a deadline for the first time for a column, I panicked. However, over time that panic becomes a rhythm and a love for challenges. Many of my colleagues in academia do not regard journalism in the same plane as literary work. But in many ways, journalism is a more accurate and insightful record of cultural landscape. So it is a vindication that the last Nobel Prize (for literature) has gone to a journalist (Svetlana Alexievich).”

A busy columnist, Shiv tells us about his output and says, “I write anywhere between 13 to 18 columns a month. And a lot of my insights come from interactions with my journalist friends who I coordinate with on a daily basis.” About the idea to compile his writings into a book, he says, “My friends had been asking me for a long time to compile them into a book. They are of the opinion that works in journalism have a very short shelf life in public memory. However, I don’t agree to that. I feel that it is the other way around. Works in journalism are like Rahul Dravid. They acquire a sort of a vintage flavour over time. In any case, the idea of making it into a book comes from the desire to bring forward the discontinuity. The three fields I mentioned above have tremendously affected the cultural landscape in the last 20 years. Modi isn’t the same man he was 20 years ago, Bollywood was making very different kind of movies 20 years ago and Maggi, which was a star on supermarket shelves back then, is now a ‘suspect’.”

Shiv explains that the response the book has got has left him surprised. “I never imagined that the book would garner the kind of response it already has. And the best part is that it is from varied quarters — university students and friends, public intellectuals (which is a term that I hate) and a large number of my everyday readers too. And that’s really heartening,” he signs off.