I'm all set to join the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) in Chennai so I can acquire a certification of my already existing skills as a journalist. Only a few days remain before classes commence and I can already feel my parents beginning to have some expectations of me. I've found that not focusing too much on that helps me calm down, pay more attention to the work at hand, and simply bask in the light of my successes. However, now that I'm finally going to study what I've always wanted to study, I have expectations of my own, and they're not all that easily disregarded.
Most of the professional journalists I've spoken to have shared one point of advice: that it would be foolish of me to expect that I can eke out a living by being critical and uncompromising of my morals all the time. At first, such statements didn't have any impact on my psyche. As time progressed - more specifically, as my expectations of myself began to pile up - I realized that I suffered the risk of becoming disillusioned with the profession itself and, eventually, turn dispassionate about it. On the one hand, there are people who've lived and worked through many journalistic experiences, whose advice I asked for, and on the other hand, there is the me who needs to defy the ethical dilemmas inherent in such possibilities. Unfortunately, the latter "me" needed a reason to consciously disregard what may or may not be the status quo and instead provide a reason to be resilient. In other words, I was to have begun before I was to start!
There's an incident I recall at this time. An acquaintance of my father's was the epitome of greed, a man given to kowtowing and pandering, and I had to meet him as part of some work. It wasn't surprising that he'd made it to some elevated rung positioned on the corporate ladder, but it was of some surprise that there were people who thought he had a moral compass at all when he cleared lacked the imitation of one. He explained that he'd always pursued money - his unabashed demeanour only helped impress upon me the truth of what he was saying - and that all his accomplishments were the generosities of providence. Outlined in that admission was the misfortune that being a good journalist was not a mark of anything, especially in India, where licking the shoes of a CEO got you an award, where a tradition of purchasing your way up was so commonplace as to be the norm. More so than anything else, this man constantly reminds me of, as Wilde might have it, the importance of being earnest.
In stark contrast to the businessman is one whose writings I consider to be less a work of artful writing as much as a reflection of a professional consistency: Palagummi Sainath, the Rural Affairs editor with The Hindu. What the businessman asked me not to do was what Sainath did best. To read about such a successful journalist went and continues to go a long way in reaffirming the faith I have in the validity of my aspirations. Soon enough, I began to ignore the disillusionment argument altogether. In fact, I assumed the liberty to go further and assume that if that's all the "advisers" had taken away from what they did, they hadn't done much anyway.
Ultimately, something of an obvious conclusion began to take shape, albeit one still riddled with questions. Was there something I could do to keep my self from falling apart? If I wanted to be a certain person, was it necessary that I always want to be that person? A well-set moral compass could be a result of personal integrity, but personal integrity comes with experience and conscious choices being made. Like I said: on one side, there is the ambitious me, and on the other, there is the one tasked with fulfilling those ambitions. The fostering of ambitions commensurate with my skills would discourage opportunism, and at the same time, it would become that much more important to pursue opportunities to hone my skills so my ambitions could be kept from deflating. Essential to either of these truisms is that I continue to be the man I am now: a believer, an aspirer.
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