In Conversation with Jai Arjun Singh

Freelance Journalist popularly known as blogger Jabberwock, on freelance journalism, books and, of course, the blog.

In a country like India – where freelancing isn’t exactly well-paying – you’re one of the few successful freelance journalists around. What exactly are the perks and perils of being a freelancers?

Well for starters – and this has become a cliché – enormous amounts of self-discipline are required. Initially, the prospects of working out of home are very good because one is not bound by office hours. If you’re not feeling particularly productive during the day, you can work late into the night. All that is true to an extent. But, in practice, it can get a little difficult, because – all said and done – it gets a little difficult to adjust to freelancing especially if you have family obligations. So, managing time is an issue – it’s something you have to constantly juggle around with.

Another peril is that when you’re a freelancer, you’re accountable to a lot of different masters. Whereas, when I was working with Business Standard full time, senior editors wouldn’t ever overload with me work. If I was doing something for one editor, then the other would back-off and understand that I was busy for the next few days. However, in freelancing, if you’re working on an assignment for two publications simultaneously, that level of understanding doesn’t exist.  There other factors to be kept in mind: lucrative offers, maintaining contacts and not wanting to say ‘no’ to too many people. So, you find yourself juggling with many stories with absolutely no reprieve.

The reason why I took up freelancing is that I didn’t want to be bound by any one particular organisation. I wanted the freedom to be able to write for different people and to be able to do it on my own time. So that benefit, on balance, overrides whatever pitfalls that have been.

But was it easy taking this decision considering the fact that you have a family and that freelancing doesn’t pay too well as opposed to a full-time job?

The financial part was not a consideration for me at all. Just to give you a background – and I don’t want to sound immodest when I say this – I developed a certain reputation while reviewing books and that happened when my blog became popular a few months after I started it in 2004. That time was a tipping point for many Indian blogs and readership was on the rise. As it happens, a lot of people in Indian media circles read blogs quite extensively; with the result that I was getting a lot of job offers from senior editors of various publications.  And these offers were courtesy the blog writing and not Business Standard. In fact, I had all but said yes to one of the offers. That’s when Business Standard – which has a creditable history of flexibility for employees it holds in high esteem – and asked me about my long term plans. I told them that I don’t see myself attached to the whole office routine system. So, the editor made me an offer wherein I did a certain amount of work for them and would pay me pretty much the same amount which I was earning as a full time employee. And I would be allowed to work out of home – maybe come in once a week for production work – and write for others. So this instantly clicked for me.  So now I was getting paid by Business Standard and was free to earn from others as well. And since independent freelance assignments do not pay well, I had ensured monetary security for myself.

Did you start Jabberwock, as a means to promote your journalistic work or did you have an opinion on other things as well which you wanted to write about?

No, I didn’t start the blog to promote anything. In fact, when I started blogging, I was woefully naïve. I didn’t have the slightest sense that the blog could lead me to a situation where a lot of people in high places are reading it and I would get job offers. When I started the blog in September 2004, I sent the link to exactly six people. And these are people who I knew liked my writing.  I started it thinking that a) it would be a storehouse for some of my journalistic writings, b) it would serve as an online notepad where I could make notes about films I had seen or books I read; notes that weren’t formal structured reviews – just ideas that came to my mind. I never imagined that the blog would develop the readership it has. In fact, till date, I am embarrassed at some level when someone comes up to me and says  ‘I read your blog.’ It makes me cringe at a level. Even though, on a detached level, I know that the blog is fairly popular. But, somewhere, it still hasn’t quite sunk in that a blog – where I put up scattered notes – has developed a readership. So, no, no intent at all.

A lot of people comment on your scattered notes and your journalistic writing as well. Do you ever change your thoughts/writings as per their comments or do you just write what you feel like?

I suppose, at a sub-conscious level, they do. I have had a lot of very nasty and flattering comments and how can you not be influenced by them? I am quite intense about my writing. For instance, if I do a really lengthy review of a book or a film that I feel very strongly about, it becomes very personal.  In fact – going off-tangent slightly – I laugh a little when someone says that I’m not a personal blogger. Because a book or a film I feel passionately about is more personal than anything else.  So, comments in either extreme, good or bad, will influence you at some level.  But, overall, I have tried to stay true to what’s going in my head. If I have something going on in my mind which I need to get out onto this online forum, I try and do it the way that I would best be able to do it. I don’t think there’s ever been a conscious process that ‘Oh, comment said this, so my next post about a subject has to be written in a certain way.’  That hasn’t happened consciously. Subconsciously- well, that’s a terrain for the philosophers!

On a different note, 2008 was a great year for Indian publishing and a lot of new writing came to the fore.  As a literary critic, what do you foresee for publishing in 2009? Which are the authors you think will create a buzz?

Well, there’s this new wave of Pakistani writing which is coming up, spearheaded these days by this very high quality and much hyped short story collection by Daniyal Mueenuddin called In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It’s interesting for various reasons because it’s going to show us new sides of Pakistan which most insulated people don’t get to see. We tend to have very tunnel-vision perceptions about that country. Other books I am looking forward to are by bloggers Amit Varma, (My Friend Sancho) and Chandrahas Choudhary ( Arzee The Dwarf). Another personal favourite is Kazuo Ishiguro – a Japanese origin writer based in England – whose collection of short stories, Nocturne, is also coming out this year.