KONG RITHDEE

Life editor and film and political columnist

Dear Bangkok Post, thank you for training me to confront the terror of the blank page. Writing is not easy, especially in the language that your mother doesn’t speak. But over the past 20 years, the paper has allowed me to play in the corner and fill the blank pages, sometimes with pride and mostly with joy.

I started here as a feature writer under the now-retired Prapai Kraisornkovit. Soon I got an opportunity to write about film, and the timing was fortuitous because the late 1990s were when Thai cinema was going through a startling resurgence, meaning there was a lot to write about.

Moving on to film criticism and cultural reporting, I struggled to put forth argument, analysis and reflection, to brave hate mail and phone calls from influential directors who were not happy with my opinion. Then I realised that it was a struggle of a bigger sort: that is, to prove that cinema, art, music, books, food and popular culture were relevant to the advancement of society, and to write about them with knowledge and conviction is as much an indispensable form of journalism as political or business reporting.

The battle, after all these years, is not over. Culture reporting is still regarded somewhat as superfluous and light, sometimes bundled in the entertainment package, especially now in the age of social media and clipped attention spans.

So the pages of the Bangkok Post have long been an arena where I and other culture reporters continue to wage the silent ambush against mediocrity (or so we hope!) and to show that there’s a distinction between sensational entertainment tidbits and a serious attempt to explore the cultural fabric of Thailand, and maybe of the world. Culture writing — it is reassuring that the Bangkok Post believes in this too — is a record of our time as much as political writing is.

I believe that when you pick up a newspaper or go to its website, you can understand the thinking of the world by reading the culture pages as much as you can when you read stock market pages or the political pages, and it’s the job of culture writers — be it about visual art or literature or film — to analyse the secrets of the world for the public, the same as political writers do in their reporting.

Nine years ago, then op-ed editor Atiya Achakulwisut assigned me the Saturday commentary column. The terror of the blank page struck me again, but then I realised that this could be the space where art, movies and politics could converge in a stream of thought, sometimes coherent, sometimes not.

The point is that the Bangkok Post has made us understand that culture writing is not just a branch of politics. It IS politics. And so in all our despair and splendour, in the stupor of doubt and lucidity of conviction, we’ll keep writing, on paper, on the web, or anywhere that the Bangkok Post, in its prime of life at 70, decides to be.