Hello, I'm back!
Stuff I've been thinking about and readers I've met.
Dear friend of Media Buddhi (and welcome new subscribers),
It’s been roughly eight months since my last post, which was an essay titled Gandhi the Muslim. That was a small investigation into the curious narratives of misinformation that people like to share about M.K. Gandhi, and it seems to have developed a small after-life of its own.
Every now and then, someone new subscribes to this newsletter precisely because of that piece. This makes me feel excited, but also embarrassed, restless and anxious. The feeling is exactly like the one you get when you have invited someone important and unfamiliar home, and now that they have arrived, you find yourself to be far away, stuck in a traffic jam.
Another thing has happened — Media Buddhi continues to get visitors everyday. The numbers are not big, but every day some 50-60 people turn up on the newsletter site, which is surprising for a periodical that hasn’t seen any updates in this long. Interpreting the number of visitors online is, despite the availability of analytics dashboards, a notoriously inaccurate science, and there is no saying who these daily visitors are. Maybe they’re bots!
But given that we humans are hardwired to read what we want from data (hello confirmation bias!), I’m going to assume that there are actual people who are waiting for me write more, and go about doing exactly that.
This is a pretty safe assumption because there are people like you, dear reader, who decided to subscribe to this newsletter at various points in the last few years. In March and April this year, I met three of you, and was re-energised by these encounters (more below).
So why haven’t I been regular with this newsletter? This is a difficult question for me to answer because the reasons are multi-factorial and complex. But I’ll talk about three of those here.
One, this newsletter comes out of and feeds back into my day job at BOOM Live, and I was simply too tied up in various work-projects. Outside of work too, I’m conscious that my number 1 responsibility is as the parent of a young member of our species. It takes almost all my time ensuring that (among other things) junior doesn’t gravitate towards electronic devices like a zombie would towards us.
Two, I’ve been engaging pretty intensely with various non-journalists on the state of propaganda, post-truth, psychology and during the process of researching, writing, and thinking about these matters, I concluded that some small things must change in the way I write.
Three, I have been preoccupied partly by what I will simply and without irony refer to as ‘tapasya’ about what is missing in the world of ‘good’ journalism, in newsletters, and on writing about India.
This process has been messy and circular, but I’ve emerged with some values or principles to focus on. I’ve woven some of these principles into the workshops I do for BOOM and will write about them here in more detail in future.
On 23rd March this year at a Chaayos in Jayanagar, Bengaluru, I met Pramod Biligiri. He is a reader of this newsletter and outside of that, a consumer of good journalism. He plies me with links to books to read or YouTube videos to consume and generally makes me think in the best way possible.
Over coffee, we chatted about each other’s work (he’s in software development), and he shared his frustrations with the state of the media. He is a dedicated reader of Deccan Herald and likes to view the journalistic programming come out of PBS in the United States. Why can’t India come up with stuff that PBS does? he asked me. ‘Budgets’, was my succinct answer.
Even with funding for journalism plunging in the US, budgets are still way, way higher there than in typical Indian newsrooms.
A couple of weeks later, I met Richa Singh and her husband Sandeep at a pizza joint in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. Richa writes her own newsletter and we have occasionally corresponded after each other’s posts. I’ve long believed that it’s OK to reveal myself even in journalistic forms of writing, but from her posts, I’ve learnt that there is a trick is to get the balance right between sharing and over-sharing.
In Guwahati in April, I met my old friend Sam Khumanthem. As we sipped on our coffees in front of the immense Brahmaputra and caught up on each other’s lives, he mentioned reading Media Buddhi. I don’t quite remember the words he used, but something he said made me feel re-energised.
Going forward, the focus with Media Buddhi will sharper. I will continue to write guides to navigate India’s politics and culture, but with a special focus on what I call the three Ps of contemporary India: post-truth, polarisation and psychology.
I also want to debut newer forms of journalistic storytelling, such as the ‘story-check’. Another is what I call the ‘anti-explainer’. What that means will, I promise, become clear to you in the weeks and months to come.
With sun salutations ☀️, moon vibes 🌗 and an ink-filled quill 🪶,
H R Venkatesh
This is a delightful analogy—“The feeling is exactly like the one you get when you have invited someone important and unfamiliar home, and now that they have arrived, you find yourself to be far away, stuck in a traffic jam.”
It’s great to see you back, Venkatesh, and I look forward to your writings on the three Ps.
Good to see you back. Eager to read what’s next!