A few days back, I chanced upon fast-crumbling cuttings of some of my old write-ups. None of those can be found online today since they predate the Internet era. I picked one up, and decided to key it in to upload it on to my blog since it was my first full-fledged feature on cinema. It had been written in April 1995 and was a critique of Clint Eastwood, who had at that time been awarded a Special Oscar for his contribution to Hollywood cinema.
As I feverishly keyed the article in, I was impressed. No, not by the quality of writing, but the sheer quantum of hard work that I had put in. Remember, those were not days of either Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). If you needed to find out anything, you had to do it the tough way. This included delving into books and rummaging through old clippings. This you could do if, at all, you had access to such storehouses of information. I was lucky to have been working at The Telegraph when I wrote it, and the Anandabazar Patrika library even till this day remains probably the best in the country. If that was not all, the chief librarian was himself a walking-talking encyclopaedia who knew exactly where to locate an old clipping.
But that would not be all – researching a story or a feature needed a lot of running around to do. By this, I very necessarily mean of the physical kind. In other words, if you needed to stitch together a write-up, you had to put in a lot of hard work. There were no short-cuts. The only other way you could write something was if you were an expert on the subject yourself.
Those, of course, are memories of another bygone day. Life is much easier now – all you need to do to pad up your write-up with background information is to Google it up. It’s a breeze.
It is also decidedly lazy. If you do a critical analysis of articles that Internet search results throw up, you will realise that many are shameless rehash jobs of earlier articles. While ferreting out information has been rendered much easier today, it has also spawned easy and indolent writing – either of the copy-paste kind, or the rehash variety. Originality is often sacrificed.
One needs to get the message here, and not the comments.
The only good thing of the old way of writing arguably was that you needed to conduct a thorough research. If finding information was not easy at the time, cross-checking facts or verifying them were buggingly difficult. Either way, you could not write a quality piece for a quality publication without putting your thinking cap on. It is this element that is often the first element to be discarded in today’s era of copy-paste journalism. It is not that deep thought is not to be seen at all – it is, but that is rather the so-called exception than the rule.
While correct information is certainly easy to find online, there is also a lot of trash. In fact, an overwhelming proportion without doubt is so. This proliferation is perpetrated by websites and portals looking to grab their share of the advertising pie. They are forever looking for ‘content writers’, whose job is to forage the Internet and rehash articles. Worse, such companies are spread all across the world. Even I get ‘job offers’ from such dubious companies, who want me to stay at home and make peanuts by churning out articles of inaccuracies. Facts go to hell.
Those of us who started writing in the pre-Internet, pre-computer era, have had another distinct advantage – that of having to perforce write on the typewriter. Using the contraption was a gruelling task. Your fingers would ache after a point, writing was slow, and the backspace key would not erase anything. If you thought at the pace of light, the same would take the shape of letters on the paper at the speed of a bullock cart. If this was not exasperating enough, the sheet that you typed out could well be littered with over-writes. No matter how clean the writing itself was, the output would still be dirty and perceived as sheer gibberish. Unless the typed-out sheet was clean, the one reading it would either crib or not be able to decipher much at all.
There was only one way to circumvent all this – you needed to think and write, a tad slowly. The operative word here is ‘think’. Writing could not be a random stream of consciousness.
Life is much easier now, and writing is fun. Certainly for those of us who have had to endure the travails of the old world. But then, any old world will always have its charms. And I am lucky to have seen both worlds.
