IN THE UAE

Novelist and ex-journalist Manu Joseph, who will be at the Sharjah International Book Fair this week, tells Anand Raj OK why social morality is overrated and insists there should be borders between activism and journalism

Journalist and author Manu Joseph, who will be at the Sharjah Book Fair, offers his take on morality in journalism.

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, says Manu Joseph, when I ask him which book he enjoyed reading recently. ‘I liked it. But I really enjoyed Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics [by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon].’

The Indian author, who will be attending the 11-day Sharjah International Book Fair that opens on November 1, admits that of late he is leaning more to non-fiction. ‘I’m not enjoying much fiction now because I find myself arguing too much with novels even when I’m enjoying them. That can be very annoying,’ says the award-winning writer. ‘But when it comes to science non-fiction, I just shut up because I’m a layman. I really enjoy it because I don’t have any opinions; I surrender myself to them.’

Manu may reserve his opinion when it comes to science non-fiction, but he clearly has his own take on everything that is happening around him if his third novel, Miss Laila, Armed and

Dangerous, is any indication. Sliding a slice of recent Indian history under the microscope, Manu proceeds to lampoon politicians, bureaucracy, journalists, social activists – even the common man.

‘[A] scathing social and political satire of our times… It is a book that will make you think,’ one reviewer gushed. So, is this his most political novel yet? ‘Yes, it is,’ says Manu. ‘I would argue that Serious Men [his first book that dealt with caste in contemporary India] too is a political novel. But people didn’t immediately see it as a political novel, although to me it actually was because, it was about Dalit [the lowest social group in India’s traditional class system] anger’. While The Guardian termed it ‘sophisticated entertainment’, Serious Men bagged him the PEN Open Book award and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the regional Commonwealth Prize, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. ‘Serious Men raised questions about what the meaning of morality is, why you should follow it, how it can intrude on democracy and how it can be used to subjugate certain sections of people. It was political in its own way but yes Miss

Laila... is way more overtly political, although I didn’t intend it to be.’

The 43 year old, who began his writing career as a journalist with Society magazine in Mumbai, agrees that the book highlights several contemporary issues. ‘Although I’d once said that I don’t like the idea of topicality, this book reflects a lot of contemporary elements. It’s so contemporary that I wanted to give it up at some point because every week I had to change something due to new happenings and developments.’

The author, a regular blogger, says that he felt readers might not understand his book a few years down the line. ‘Ten years from now, they might not even realise that it was a literary-experimentation point of view,’ he says. Was he worried about the relevance of the book? ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I knew there were a lot of things that would be relevant only now and not 10 years from now. Still I wanted to go on. It was one of those books I had to finish or I wouldn’t have been able to move on to anything else.’

Despite moving from journalism to literature, Manu says that there are a lot of parallels between the two. ‘You need to be an interesting writer, an engaging writer; literature offers the writer the freedom to go into the minds of people. In journalism you can’t,’ he says, admitting that journalism was his first love.

‘This was one of the two professions I knew as a child,’ he says. ‘The other was the civil service. My mother is from a village in Kerala and she was keen that I enter the civil service. I was acquainted with journalism because my dad was a

journalist.’ Manu grew to love journalism ‘because I had a lot of misconceptions about it. But then you often love something for all the wrong things and then you learn to love it for all the right reasons. That’s what happened to me’.

For a while Manu also dabbled in movie-making. ‘It was too collaborative although I did write the script for a Hindi film, Love

Khichdi,’ he says. Was activism a reason he chose journalism? ‘Strangely, I never suffered from that disease,’ says the former editor of Open magazine and columnist for The

International New York Times and The Hindustan Times, among others. ‘I was always a writer and knew the power of telling stories. So for me journalism was all about story telling; a combination of telling a good powerful story in an engaging way. And of course when you are young and in this profession it was hard to escape the morality of it all.’

I’m suspicious of activism, because it is filled with believers and believers are always more dangerous than frauds

However, it didn’t take him long to question the idea of morality. ‘I think journalists begin to latch on a bit too much to social morality. I began to see that there is something wrong in it. It’s easy to use social morality as a crutch and I realised it was a convenient excuse to avoid the hard work of doing a story if you are using social morality as a plot device.’ So can journalism and activism go hand in hand? ‘Just as there are clear borders between corporates and journalists, I believe strongly that there should be borders between activism and journalism,’ says Manu. ‘The infestation of activism in journalism is as corrupt and corrupting as the corporate influence on journalism is. It’s in fact more dangerous, because in the beginning at least it does not look evil or as bad as it really is.’

Activists may seem to be doing something of value to society while in truth they may have their own agenda, which at first it may not be apparent, he adds. ‘Also, I’m suspicious of activism, because it is filled with believers and believers are always more dangerous than frauds. Frauds operate at a very small level,’ he says. Another bugbear of his: Extreme altruism. ‘Altruism is a powerful phenomenon in our society, which is seen as something good and I do believe that the objective of the strong is to protect the weak. But a lot of this extreme altruism is not a consequence of sanity at all. They are doing it because they can’t help it; they are being influenced by their mental health. Because insanity is always more influential than sanity, these extreme altruists become very powerful. Insanity can influence people,’ he says. Any particular ritual that he follows while writing? ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Although for my second book, Illicit

Happiness, I used to listen to one particular song by [south Indian music director] Ilayaraja, a very beautiful number from [Tamil film] Nayakan called Thenpaandi Cheemayile. ‘I’d become very anglicised. At one time, I used to speak only in Tamil. I felt I needed to get back to my roots, so to speak, so I used to listen to that number often – one of the most beautiful songs in the world. It would be foolish on my part to say that it had nothing to do with the tone of the book; it was to remind me of my childhood.’