by MUKUL DUBE
Only an optimist would try to freelance for a living, and only someone extremely hardy would survive the daily negotiations involved in trying to get published in the country`s leading publications.
Last year’s massacre in Gujarat shook me so badly that I began writing again for the press – something I had given up, apart from sporadic short pieces, twenty years earlier – at the rate of just over two articles each month. Here I shall relate some of my experiences as a free-lance writer, unpleasant ones, over the last fourteen months.
The Economic and Political Weekly is a much respected publication. It is also an exceptionally badly run one. In the year 2002 I sent it three pieces of writing, two of which it carried. It did not acknowledge receiving even one of these – not even the second, which its editor had encouraged me to write – and, in respect of the two pieces which it published, it did not ever tell me that it would publish them. At the time the journal printed, in each issue, a “notice to contributors” which spoke grandly of the wholly mythical number which would be allotted to each article received and which should be quoted in further correspondence. The best laid plans of rats…
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The Hindustan Times was the first periodical in which I was published in circumstances such that I received a cheque. The year was 1971. In that year was born an inDIVidual who in 2002 came to be given charge of the paper’s edit page. He published three of the things I sent in, though he never acknowledged receiving one, and on more than one occasion I had to send an article a second time because this person said he had not received it the first time. Parenthetically, this leaves the field open for a serious inquiry into the possible reasons for editors’ e-mail being substantially more chancy than that of ordinary people.
Not once did this worthy carry a piece of mine on the day on which he had said he would carry it. He badly mauled one piece, needlessly dulling his pencil, putting alien words and even falsehoods into my mouth; and when I protested, he apologised profusely and gave me to understand that the person responsible (not himself, of course) had been ticked off. To his editor, however, he said later that he had only “edited it to what [he] thought fit”.
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