FROM THE BRIDGE ABOVE, they seem like ants against that vast riverbank, the reporters and other prospectors of death prowling around lifeless forms. The wind scatters scraps of words. Here’s another, what is it? A magazine! It died with an awful sound, we saw it falling. When that scene unfolded, a halal slaughter conducted painfully and without anaesthesia, in August and September 2021, everyone was watching. The usual muted gasps of horror filled the public square, followed by an awed hush. Watching from inside the belly of the beast, as it were, there could not have been a more fitting coda to an utterly remorseless time.
When did it begin? Let us nominate an arbitrary starting point: those fiats strafing through the air. You are no longer a citizen. (It could not have been simpler.) Kashmir is no longer a state. (A state of mind, then?) You have three hours, after which you do not move. Information blackouts, agitations ending in riots, young people filling the prisons, the world itself turning into a prison, the air thinning out, literally and metaphorically, in a year or two saturated with death. Humans, things, predictability, the orderly waltz we have trained our neurons to dance—all had become corpses in the river. We choked on sheer disbelief. Intimations of apocalypse mean you fear for the future of time itself. What is a magazine in the midst of this procession of death? Get a few cylinders of oxygen here, fast!
Magazines do not die anyway. A biological death does not displace them from the palace of memories—and here, it was not even biological. It was a symbolic death, a ritual sacrifice, re-enacted with a strange periodicity. The possibility that it can live, and thrive again, always exists. This was just another episodic climax in an eternal battle of elemental forces, like some Manichaean myth being played on loop.
A deliberately misread line of verse keeps returning to mind: “Idhar ek harf ki kushtani”—Here lies a letter of the alphabet, slain.
Not for the first time, the image kindles the memory of my father, looking up from his newspaper one day and making one of his gnomic utterances: “Ivaru aksharavairi aanu”—These people are enemies of the letter.
Before preparing a coroner’s report after one’s fancy, it is worth asking how magazines live. A magazine’s work is the work of memory, of stabilising the ceaseless flow of events for the benefit of our reflection. At a tactile level, what apartment blocks do with space, they do with time. They cut up a borderless duration into grids on paper, into little squares and boxes: text and visual string together to fill them, to form the Penrose stairs within which we circulate. Telling stories, selecting which stories to tell, interpreting, analysing—memorialising. Doing history in a hurry, literature on the quick, culture and politics through the very act of existing. How does one reconstruct that in memory? It needs a risky, reflexive leap into a corridor of mirrors; the objects you recover are already fragments of a collective mind.
Yet, I recognise a certain obligation to do so. I was a part of Outlook from its very genesis, in 1995, to when I handed in my resignation, on 14 September 2021. That is twenty-six years in one job, half my life. A career made in longform is, of course, quite the anomaly these days, when jobs run the span of 280 characters, so this was surely lived out and enacted as more than just a job. Keeper of the flame, then? How can you leave, this is your magazine! Delusions of belonging are natural when red blood corpuscles have been alchemised into ink for so long. From this vantage point, though, I find myself uniquely situated to tell the story of Outlook’s extraordinary journey, as much as a matter of self-auditing as of examining its place in public life, not as a prosaic chronicle of events—for which there will be better hands—but as a collage of fragments, impressionistic and necessarily subjective.
EVEN IF THERE is no death, there was a registered birth. Outlook was born in the summer of 1995; the natal ward was a sleepy floor in Delhi’s Lodhi Hotel. Vinod Mehta, a career editor on whom the word “iconic” sits with mannered ease, was centre stage. Around his large, slouching frame gathered a set of journalists—some experienced, some yet to find themselves, some old favourites of Vinod from Bombay, some new finds, a sizeable contingent from India Today (which would be our only rival in the magazine space, a formidable one), some passengers among them too but the elite corps, senior and junior, all crack hands, brimming over with brio, with ideas, with vim and vigour and plenty of vinegar. It was an Ocean’s Eleven kind of moment.
I had signed on too, only 26 years old at the time, but walking with the swagger of the best desk jockey on the ranch. I had already put in a decade’s worth of work in five years of the graveyard shift at the Indian Express, chosen over seniors, as a six-month-old trainee, to crack the Gulf War leads into shape. I had seen through the momentous arrivals of Mandal, Mandir and Market—as well as of the Macintosh in dowdy newsrooms—and was a bit of a precocious long-haired veteran, comporting myself with the vibes of a young Jerry Garcia. (Alas! I went clean-shaven before I first met Vinod, else, I was assured, he would have given me a heftier package.) But for all my exertions at the Express, it had always been there. This was different. This was ab initio, and I would be a co-creator.
The office was inaugurated, on 25 August, in a dowdy corner of a marketplace that seemed stuck in the 1960s, next to an old single-screen cinema that was long past its last show. A few dummy runs followed. The air was agog in a way that can only be recreated when there is a surfeit of newness around: the proximity of wizened and dew-fresh eyes, each mind in a state of stimulation, prismatic hexagons buzzing with electricity and feeding off each other. Perhaps Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem during the early 1940s, those dingy, smoke-filled afterhours when Charlie Christian birthed a whole genre on his guitar with his pals, had something of this
