The bylines that refuse to go gently...

BY AMRIT DHILLON| IN Media Practice | 21/07/2014

What’s that line from Ecclesiastes? There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens? You wouldn’t know it, judging by the decades that some weekly newspaper columnists have been writing.

How long a newspaper column should run is like asking how long is a piece of string. One year? Three years? Ten? Till the columnist drops dead? I have no idea what the answer is but I do feel that some of the columnists in the English press who have been around for close to two decades or more - Karan Thapar, Shobhaa De, Kuldip Nayar, Coomi Kapoor, Gurcharan Das, Prem Shankar Jha, Vinod Mehta, Tavleen Singh – should bow out gracefully.

It’s not that their writing is no good (though Thapar’s column has always inclined towards the inconsequential and trite) but readers get bored with the same old byline and the predictable arguments, just as we all get bored with the same old film stars or sports stars after a while and hanker for a fresh face.

Didn’t we all get thoroughly bored with Boris Becker winning every Wimbledon, just like some of us are getting bored with Roger Federer?

And mind you, Wimbledon is only once a year. A weekly column comes round much faster. I admit I have the greatest admiration for anyone who can perform this formidable feat. The deadline comes around so frighteningly quickly that I’d be paralysed with fear for the whole week, dreading what to write about and agonizing over whether I can say anything interesting.  

Inevitably, after a while, most columns start sounding stale. I have rarely disagreed with anything that Tavleen Singh has written but for years now her writing has been somewhat predictable and repetitive. I do not blame her; it’s a miracle she has been able to keep going for so long.

But surely it’s time for some of these columnists to stop behaving as though they are entitled to a job for life? Surely it has occurred to them and to the management that readers are bored with them? Editors pick well-known names for obvious reasons and don’t seem to have the courage to try out someone new, but the least they can do is to offer one relatively unknown name amid some famous ones?

This balance between old and new is something that the British press (I am not familiar with the US media) seems to manage deftly and I urge Indian editors to put their readers first and try this out.

The other reason they should be retired is that fresh talent must be allowed a platform. They cannot hog newspaper space for so long when there are budding writers out there who will undoubtedly sound fresher and offer different insights. New generations come in – younger readers with a different take on the world and different interests – but our weekend editions of newspapers cling to writers in their 60s and 70s.   

These old warhorses seem determined to match the record of columnists like Jack Ingram in the UK who contributed weekly articles on Scouts and Scouting to the Heywood Advertiser from 1933 until 2004, a total of 71 years, and made it into the Guinness Book of Records.

As did Hiroyuki Itsuki, a Japanese daily columnist (a daily column can only for certified masochists), who churned out copy for the Nikkan Gendai for 32 years.

Where are the new columnists? Perhaps the most recent new recruit is novelist Chetan Bhagat at the Times of India. You may hate him or like him but he is a fresh voice and perspective. And it was wonderful, at the other end of the intellectual spectrum, when the Indian Express took on Pratap Bhanu Mehta whose insights and erudition are thrilling.

Other new, or newish, names such as Aakar Patel and Shoba Narayan at Mint are also a superb read. And the quirky Shombit Sengupta at the Indian Express is uneven but original.  

But the ultimate, ultimate vanity of columnists is to publish a collection of their columns. When a columnist recently published his collection of articles, he showed that he thinks the adage that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper applies only to others, not him.

On the day you read them, his articles make for excellent reading but who is really interested in what Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale said to him or anyone else on some day 30 years ago unless you are studying the Punjab insurgency? 

The only purpose of these collections is to give some intellectual heft, in the shape of a book, to columnists who seek gravitas. Even worse is when the columnist promotes the book in the column and organizes debates – yes, debates – around hoary events and anecdotes that are, at least in my opinion, of little or no contemporary interest and are intended mainly to aggrandize the writer.   

But to answer the question of how long a column should run for, I reckon columnists should be allowed to continue only for as long as they offer fresh insights and thought-provoking arguments. Swaminathan Aiyar is one such person. There must be others I am not aware of. As to the rest, it’s time they retired and made way for young blood.

Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist in New Delhi.