Running a magazine is, to put it mildly, an absolutely crazy job – as I’ve learnt in my three and a half years of (happily!) running Himal. Working as a magazine editor even when you’re not running one is often only a little less crazy, or at least that’s been my experience over 15+ years in independent Southasian magazines. The hours go from long to longer, the deadlines from tough to tougher, the pressures from serious to murderous.
One of the challenges is just to keep up and process everything that’s zooming at and past you. And so the weeks blur into months blur into years, and looking back you struggle to tell how many months ago you met that reporter or in what year exactly you worked on that piece.
But every so often along the way, you hit a landmark. A story that stands as a monument, that has an X factor that affixes attention and time, that demands you order around it all your recollections of a particular period. I’ve been lucky enough to have a few of those, and much of my professional memory is structured around them. Sometimes I didn’t recognise these stories for what they were in the moment, but by now, with the advantage of experience, I think I know one when I see it.
I say all this because we have one such story on the way later this week, and I’m very excited to get it out into the world. It’s not an earth-shattering corporate expose or political scandal (though we’re always glad to publish those too!), but I love this story all the more for how it delves beyond the “usual” subjects of hard-hitting investigations. It’s got ancient culture, crime and a cover-up, and it has a wonderful narrative that takes the reader along on the journey of solving the whole thing. Plus it brings with it a genuine chance that the crimes exposed might actually be remedied, even if there’s no reversing the damage already done. (The story also involves Nepal, my home, which for me counts as an added bonus.)
Coordinating the last pre-publication steps for this story these last few weeks, I’ve been thinking back to the other ambitious investigative pieces I’ve gotten to work on and publish in the past. We’ve had a fair number of those in Himal of course, and we’ll be adding a section to our homepage soon to showcase them. I’ve also been thinking about how much this kind of work matters. We live in a world that’s unjust and broken in so many ways, and as ordinary citizens we’re very often powerless to fix things. But for people determined to fight back, investigative journalism is one of the few ways we can actually and reliably make a difference, even if only a small one. The heroes here can be whistle-blowers, researchers, activists, reporters – but they can also be readers just like you who choose to support the hard work it takes to bring such journalism into the world.
Which is why we need your support as a Himal Patron. Our paying supporters have made it possible for us to invest more and more resources into chasing, producing and publishing stories that really matter, that make a difference, and that you won’t find anywhere else. Sign up as a Patron today to be a hero for independent journalism, so that we can bring out this story and many more like it.
Now back I go to the last proofs on the story. We’ll have it out in a few days and I’d be glad to hear what you make of it. Just hit reply on this email to let me know.
All best
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Roman Gautam Editor Himal Southasian |
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SOUTHASIA MIXTAPE 📻🎵
Music means a lot to me – I've played and performed, I help organise a music festival in Kathmandu, and there's nowhere I'd rather be on a Saturday evening than at a jazz bar or qawwali baithak. So each month I bring you a new recommendation from my musical adventure of discovering ever more about Southasia and the Southasian diaspora, one tune at a time.
Nanda Malini, who passed away last week at 82, was one of Sri Lanka’s most beloved singers, with a career spanning more than six decades. I regret that I never listened to her while she was alive, but thanks to one of Himal’s editors, Shwetha Srikanthan, I’ve had a crash course in her music over the last few days.
For this month’s Southasia Mixtape, Shwetha has agreed to give you that crash course too. In her words:
“Many Sri Lankans will have their own favourites – ‘Tharuda Nidana Maha Re’, ‘Budu Sadhu’, ‘Ammawarune’ and countless others – but I’ve been listening again to the album ‘Pawana’, Nanda Malini’s 1987 collaboration with the lyricist Sunil Ariyaratne.
These songs came out as Sri Lanka was entering the second JVP insurrection – an armed uprising that would be met with a brutal campaign of state repression – and they were subsequently banned from state radio and television. Yet they circulated widely on cassette tapes and were in high demand at Nanda Malini’s concerts.
There’s something powerful about the contrast between the beauty and restraint of her voice and the anguish of the words she is singing. These are songs about loss, about the hope for a different country, and they capture the fears and aspirations of a generation of young Sri Lankans. Nanda Malini’s voice is ineffaceable in Sri Lanka’s musical memory, and her songs have become part of how the country remembers one of its most difficult periods.”