Crossing the line

A fun and informative discussion on the ways literature and journalism overlap

With a panel that comprised of Arunava Sinha, Samanth Subramanian, Salil Tripathi and Aatish Taseer, one could predict an exuberant and intellectually stimulating discussion and the panelists gave the audience just that.

Arunava set the ball rolling by asking if journalists would make good novelists, to which Salil gave the example of Hemingway, “It made him the short story writer that he was,” at which point, Samanth disagreed saying that all literature isn't fiction. Aatish, on his part, said it depended on the difference of locale.

The discussion then shifted to the lines one has to cross from journalism to literature. Aatish said, “In journalism, you report to not be a part of what's happening; imagination is needed to make that into fiction.” Salil, meanwhile, classified broadly the differences between journalism — immediate, short-term, factual — and non-fiction literature — carried out a few years later and is based on reality — and gave examples from his latest book on Bangladesh. Aatish cited

The Return of Eva Peron With The Killings In Trinidad by V.S. Naipaul as an example of non-fiction writing in literary form and how the writer created a “mood of menace towards the end” to make it a work of literature. Samanth, on the other hand, remarked that it was hard to define some lines. “The difference in the atmosphere the story creates, the characters and the scene development, all become literature.”

The panel went through topics like bridging the gap between facts and reality (Samanth: “literature is the underlying basic truth of people, which isn't possible in a 800-word piece that still has an arc.”), the omnipresent problem of the writer inserting oneself in the piece (Aatish: “in literary non-fiction, the way of looking at things is tremendously important; becomes almost as interesting as what is being seen.”), the prolonged parley on the shelf life of fiction versus non-fiction (Arunava: “a book cannot be replaced by a well-curated anthology of newspaper pieces”; and Salil, who attributed the popularity of the Watergate scandal even today to mainly, “abuse of power” and the “craft of journalism”), before settling on the need for more readable literary non-fiction in India.