2021

#23 On writerly ambitions and some recommendations

Dec 28, 2021

Hey everyone, welcome back!

Sometimes I wonder: Why write? Why should I write? I know as a young writer I should put myself through as much practice as I can afford (as Gulzar sahab once said about writing, “karte ki vidya hain, karne se aata hain”). But why should I publish anything I write? I can just make a draft in Google Docs and revise and rewrite it for the millennia to come. Why publish? Why make anything public and subject you good people to my crappy writing?

Every writer on the internet, at least once in his life, asks himself this question. Because the Internet, for him, has removed all the gatekeepers, the editors and publishers at the newspapers and magazines, who in their shady rooms, and in their biased ways, made judgements about the “talent” of the writers and separated the “good ones” from the bad.

The good ones, they got weekly columns and book deals. The “bad ones,” well, their writing probably never saw the light of the day.

The Internet, it lowered the cost of publishing (Wordpress, Ghost). It removed the barriers to entry. And it expanded the pool of the potential audiences. It also made it possible for the so called bad writers, who often unsurprisingly belonged to disadvantaged communities, to publish their writing, to share with the world their unique perspectives, their opinions and their understanding.

But all these liberating features of the Internet also gave birth to, pardon my French, a ton of bullshit: SEO blogs, marketing emails, click-baits, outrage-baits, and the worst of them all “fake news.” Gradually the implications of the displacement of the gatekeepers became more apparent. The need for self-regulation, that became more apparent. And with Facebook and Twitter, as a writer on the Internet, as someone with a conscience, you started to ask yourself: am I not myself a part of this bullshit producing system?

When I started this newsletter, I had the hope that the world will change for the better. But I also had the hope that writing on the Internet, and being a writer on the Internet, would also change for the better.

Newsletters are built with the idea of subscription at their heart. The writer writes something that is useful and insightful, something that can keep the reader interested from the beginning to the end. The reader, in return, becomes a subscriber, a patron to the writer, supporting his work with a recurring payment. The reading experience gets more pleasant as your eyes are not subjected to the torture that is pop-up ads. The whole writer-reader relationship transforms into a win-win bargain.

In the last few months, my life certainly has changed for the better. I’ve completed my bachelors in economics (hooray!), and started my Masters in Statistics (out of the frying pan, straight into the fire). I’ve made new friends and created new memories.

This has been a tough period of transition and because of that I’ve not been able to write and publish consistently. I’ve written few pieces (come take a look at my Google Docs). But I haven’t published them for the aforementioned reasons. I don’t want to produce bullshit and I don’t like the notion of subjecting you to bullshit.

Though this is not a paid newsletter, I want the reader-writer relationship still to be a win-win one, because you can’t believe how grateful I am for your subscription and support. You have taken this community from seventeen to seventy. So, THANK YOU. Going forward, I’ll be writing more explainers and more essays and I plan to do some interviews. Wish me luck and enjoy your holidays. HAPPY NEW YEAR 🥳

Jealousy List

I got this idea from the journalists at the Bloomberg Businessweek, who every year compile a list of stories that they wish they had published. This is my “Jealousy list.” I admire all these writers, some I worship, and I wish I could write as clearly, as insightfully, as eloquently as any of them.

I wrote an essay about Afghanistan and the death of the idea of “democracy promotion.” Couple of days later, Timothy Nunan, an academic historian, published an essay titled “the end of nation-building” in the Noema magazine. And that essay was everything I aspired my essay to be. So I was a little bit jealous.
Anand Gopal wrote a piece for the New Yorker, with reporting from Afghanistan, on the experience of “The Other Afghan Women,” women from the countryside, women who have seen the not-so-bad, the bad, and the worst under regimes of all shapes and sizes. I was jealous both of the reporting and the writing.
I’m interested in understanding the appeal of fake news and misinformation. But I’ve never written anything about them. So I was planning an essay. Then I read the essay “Bad News” by Joseph Bernstein in the Harper’s magazine. I dropped the idea of my essay because this one made me rethink my entire conception and question all the conventional notions.
I do a fair amount of writing about climate change. But David Wallace-Wells is always the gold standard. You may disagree with his arguments, but his writing, you can’t criticise. He wrote a piece in the London Review of Books titled “Ten Million A Year” about the lives lost to air pollution each year. It’s a must read, to say the least.
Sarah A. Topol of the New York Times Magazine and Ben Taub of The New Yorker, two international reporters whose investigative and reporting work always makes me jealous. This year Sarah wrote an article titled “Is Taiwan Next” on the history of Taiwan and the Chinese aggression. Ben on the other hand wrote about “how a Syrian war criminal and double agent disappeared in Europe.” To say I was jealous will be an understatement.

This obviously is an incomplete list. To find out the other writers I’m jealous of, just follow me on Twitter @heyworldorder. Every piece of writing I share, the author is someone I’m definitely jealous of.

Recommendation🍿

TV Shows: 📺

Reservation Dogs (my thoughts)
Made for Love (sci-fi, comedy, wrote a review, never published, you can read here)
Only Murders in the Building (comedy, drama, my thoughts)
Vigil (thriller, my thoughts)
Mare of Easttown (thriller, my thoughts)