The Art19 team in conversation with Rihan Najib, who graduated from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, in 2013.
Rihan majored in Development Studies, as a result of which she has a heightened sense of irony. Currently, she is a journalist with the Hindu Business Line, where she handles the books section of its magazine. She has three cats that are, in various measures, silly, compassionate and intelligent.
Can you tell us where you’re currently based and what you’re currently working on?
I am based in New Delhi and I handle the books section at BLink, the Hindu Business Line’s magazine. I am currently working on the review of a rather inept debut novel, while wondering how to be simultaneously gracious and hostile to contributors who miss deadlines.
…
What was that?
I missed all my deadlines for this interview? Despite repeatedly extending them? Since December LAST YEAR?!
…
Yes, that’s right, you see, I…erm…what happened was, like…
(trails off into a chastened silence)
In the 5 years since you graduated, you have worked at several prominent organizations, and you’re now a journalist with the Hindu. Can you describe your experiences? How much has the MA program helped you in these various roles?
I have a special kind of sigh reserved for navel-gazing in public. It goes like this – I inhale deeply while gazing into the distance, awash with the belated enlightenment of hindsight, and raising my eyebrows, I exhale slowly with a faint smile. Now, if you see me or anyone else doing this, you must swiftly club us across the head, and offer no further explanation. Because anything that is about to follow that cross-eyed look of rapture is either an abject lie, or the half-digested plot of a Julian Barnes novel – and both are a waste of your time.
The fact is, I find it hard to answer this question, because I really don’t know how to describe much of it. For the longest time after I had graduated, I had the sense that things weren’t adding up. In my graduation ceremony, I was told that I was the one per cent of the one per cent. All I had to do was go forth and prosper. Then I entered the Indian work force and realized what I was – cheap labour.
That might seem like a farcical statement, but I would have saved myself a lot of heartburn if I could have gotten used to that fact sooner. In my first job, I was so redundant that I faced genuine competition from a stapler. Oh those were the days. The glory, I tell you, in the dawning realization that all those evenings in insti suffering Lefebvre and Appadurai had culminated in me sitting at the back of a training hall pinning together reading material while a colleague held forth on the urban condition of the Global South.
Thereafter, it was an education, and perhaps the one that mattered. I left my first job, lost the next one, couldn’t find another for a long time, worked awful freelance gigs, and then found something near perfect. In one sense, the MA program stopped being important. My grades and thesis dictated no part of my career after graduation. But in another sense, I couldn’t have hoped for a better ally than a liberal arts education as I entered journalism. In that respect, when I have to cover an event or write a review, I go back to basic lessons – what is the information at hand, how do I critically deconstruct an argument, what are the biases in my reading. Pay attention in classes that deal with things like this, you’ll need it. Because it doesn’t matter how good you are at learning, but it does matter what you do with it.
Can you tell us about how you first got into creative writing, the themes you like to explore, and your process of writing (if any)? Do you have plans for a future publication?
I think it had something to do with how bored I was throughout school. Back then, I read to distract myself, to drift into other worlds that seemed infinitely more interesting than my own. Then I tried writing in the style of whatever I was reading, using memorized words, phrasing and flourishes that had moved me. Of course, on one hand, Dom Moraes and Jeet Thayil ought to be flattered that a small-town something was learning the craft through their work. On the other hand, it’s plagiarism. Thankfully, none of my early pieces has ever seen the light of day, and I’ve grown out of learning by imitation.
Regarding themes and process, I have a laughably meagre body of work – some short stories and the occasional poem that honestly can’t stake any claim to literary merit. So far, I have written about women doing various things, and I’ll be glad to continue that. Hemingway had said some rubbish about being authentic, and writing in a true voice. I don’t know what that means anymore. So I prefer Joan Didion’s simple rule: “See enough and write it down.”
A future publication? Perhaps in the distant future. The world is littered with people in their late twenties publishing angsty memoirs instead of just going to therapy and dealing with their self-esteem issues. There is a case to be made for gestation – for a book that loiters around the edges of one’s life, waiting in the wings, growing with you, sentence by sentence. I like patient writers who show up with a story, and I hope I can do the same one day, maybe someday, but not any time soon
You have had the opportunity to complete a semester abroad in Bremen when the EU was facing tumultuous times with regard to the Greek debt crisis. Did the experience of being in the EU (Germany, at that) and studying its politics during such a time help shape your understanding in ways that it couldn’t have otherwise?
If that’s what you thought I was doing at Bremen, you’re *sigh* mistaken.
I have a picture that I took during a trip to Berlin. Despite the image being out of focus, you can see the Occupy movement’s signboards and young white faces marching towards change. When I took the photo, I could barely hold the camera in one hand and a large mug of beer in the other as I battled a skull-pounding hangover. That should answer this question somewhat.
No? Won’t do?
Well, I was in Europe for five months. I had just turned 20, and was going to a foreign country by myself for the first time. I couldn’t believe my luck. I raced through my readings and classes, and then sped towards Gluhwein, Dunkelbier, cheesecake and coffee by the Weser. In class, I would contribute as well as I could to ongoing discussions of global inequality and the failure of the European project. But I must be honest, I couldn’t wait for class to end so that I could dash off to a small pizza parlour run by a sweet Sri Lankan man.
That’s not to say it was all revelry. The politics of those tumultuous times in the EU came to me in other ways. Most of my classmates were significantly older and decidedly non-academic – one had extensive carpentry experience, another had been a Greenpeace activist, and yet another worked at a casino. Our lunchtime conversations were charged with revelations and comparisons, observations and analysis. And after conversations like that, you couldn’t stop seeing those politics in action around you – whether it’s the state welfarism, or the class dynamics, or the racism. So I’d say that the exchange program helped me read a particular point of EU’s contemporary history, but it would be an epistemic stretch to say I was sober through most of it.
Even now, some students would say one of their biggest takeaways from the program was an existential dilemma. A lot of us are clueless as to what lies ahead after the course. As someone who’s worked in several profiles, can you tell us about the difficulties you might have faced in your career? Do you think the program equips you with enough to traverse a turbulent job market?
Well, I’ve addressed this question to some extent in Q2, so please bear with me if you feel I’m repeating myself.
By and large, the Indian education system is geared towards ends; it serves the middle-class dream of job-flat-car. When students emerging from such a system enter a liberal arts education, like the MA program, they can’t be blamed for mistaking it for what most colleges in India are – placement agencies.
So by the pre-final year, when one sees one’s BTech peers land jobs with astronomical salaries, it’s really disheartening to struggle to get a job that pays more than peanuts. I’ve heard that HS placement scene has improved vastly, but when I was graduating, we didn’t have much visibility or clout with companies. We got the dregs of the development sector, and it felt terrible, especially because contrary to popular opinion, the IIT tag didn’t count for much.
But here’s what I know now – the MA program is not meant to give you a job. A liberal arts education is meant to shape the way you think. It will offer perspective, and maybe mentorship, but rarely employment. That you will have to do on your own merit.
Blame the department for courses that are taught unimaginatively, for retaining professors who read out ppts under the guise of pedagogy, and for not having a more robust methodological component in its training. But don’t blame it for not helping you with your existential crisis.
I can’t tell you what lies ahead after the course, because I frankly don’t know, and I only have my experience to go by. So I’d say that what matters after graduation is how well you can adapt to situations, how critically you think, how effectively you can apply concepts to observations, and most importantly – how gently you forgive and resolve your own perceived inadequacies as well as that of others. Trust me, that last one is crucial. Therapy is morbidly expensive, so make a habit of being good to yourself.
One current trend in the department/institue is students’ participation in the race for PoRs. There are sceptics in the department who doubt the utility of the same for a student of the Humanities and there are people who think otherwise. What’s your take on this?
I’ll keep it short – it’s not as important as it is made out to be. But it’s your call.
Forward to 5 years since graduation, has any of the insti lingo stuck on with you? Any funny post-insti anecdotes related to this you could share?
No, I scrubbed my tongue clean of that drivel.
I didn’t have any affection for insti lingo, then and now. Even for the sake of fitting in, there was something silly about the pride people took in saying, “pack, macha” or “put grub”. But who am I to judge, really? I spent a fair amount of time learning the dialect of my community. By my second year, I would frown at something because it was problematic. By the third year, things had discursive possibilities. In the fourth year, if I used the first person voice in my analysis, I was implicating the self in the research. By final year, the only word I had was please. Please accept MAP findings. Please give job. Please give recco. Please, ya.
My insti lingo anecdote – There was this one time I was washing my clothes in the hostel bathroom when a horde of rampaging monkeys charged at the large garbage bins in the corner. After they had left, I heard a girl ask her friend, “Macha, how many monkeys were there, da?” Her friend replied, “N-max, da.” Her friend looked aghast that there were that many.
Imagine you woke up one day to find yourself as the HoD. Are there any changes you would effect in the department?
Funny you should ask. I was hanging out with my brother when we were recently home on vacation. We were discussing very matter-of-factly how, after all the effort that we had put in, we hadn’t amounted to much in the eyes of our parents. So if I were HoD, I would instate a four credit course titled, Negotiating Parental Disappointment: Concepts and Methods. This would be taught in the fourth year, when the career questions begin and the existential ennui is at its peak.
My brother was right when he asked, “why don’t they teach us these things? It’s more important than algebra.
I’d like to teach that course, given my extensive knowledge on the subject. I’ll grade students on their willingness to risk defying their parents’ expectations and make them write essays that deconstruct their need to please authority figures. At the end of the course, they will have a take-home quiz that will involve them challenging a central expectation that their parents have of them.
Well, wouldn’t that be fun?
Interview by the Article 19 team.
Article 19 