‘Only a fool, in this late day, would ignore India’

‘Only a fool, in this late day, would ignore India’



Nandini Nair : Sat Jan 21 2012, 02:50 hrs

David Remnick, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and editor of The New Yorker since 1998, talks to Nandini Nair in Jaipur about the challenge of running the magazine, and his own vivid subjects, from Muhammad Ali to Barack Obama. Excerpts:

Tell us about your past, and how the New Yorker job happened.

It is a very simple story. After school (Princeton, 1982), I joined The Washington Post. In 1988, I went to Moscow, which was going through a very interesting time. I have been preposterously lucky twice in my life — once by going to Moscow and once by becoming the editor of The New Yorker? A friend at the New York Times was once asked: “How do you get that job?” He said, “Get lucky”. Sometimes it is just that.

For a reporter at heart, how do you feel about being an editor?

There’s a huge difference between writing and being an editor. When you are writing, it is a singular process. As an editor you are like an impresario for others and their work. It requires the juggling — excuse the mixed metaphor — of a lot of different things, from creative to managerial.

Is there the impulse to do something different with The New Yorker, to resist the template?

Yes, sometimes there is that urge. In 2008, we put on our cover Obama with a (turban) — you know what I am talking about. That did shake things up. When (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad said there were no homosexuals in Iran, we put him in a toilet stall, with a foot coming under the door, on the cover. It’s important to do things like that. The New Yorker is a very strange magazine, we have different tools in our kit. I don’t think there is an Indian or Chinese or Russian equivalent. It has deep reporting, intense fact-checking (twice, at least), humour, short stories, fiction. It is a unique animal. People read it for that, but they also read it for individual writers. A Katherine Boo is very different from a John Updike. In that sense, it is very different from The Economist, which is a terrific magazine, but largely anonymous. And now we are growing into the online world. I go to office on the subway. I see people reading it on the train. They read it on this (taking out his phone from his pocket). I don’t know how convenient that is.

How do you view India, as a potential market for The New Yorker?

Only a fool in this late day would ignore India. The New Yorker has never ignored India, we’ve written reams. But I would like to do more. It’s foolish to think that a country is strong only when it becomes rich. We had a special Indian fiction issue 13 years ago. Salman Rushdie helped us with that. We have never done that with any other country. We should do more. Ved Mehta. (He was a staff writer for the magazine from 1961 to 1994).

We have a few thousand subscriptions in India. But I can count... How are you going to use it (this market)? I don’t know. We are in the early stages yet. How late does an issue arrive here? Three weeks? Ten years ago, it would have been forever late. But the vibrancy of the magazine is that it combines different time frames.

Tell us about your book King of the World: Rise of Muhammad Ali and the rise of an American Hero.

Boxing is a morally indefensible sport. I wouldn’t take my children to it. But I wrote of that world because of Muhammad Ali. I was a 10-year-old-kid.

There was a 12-year gap between Muhammad Ali and The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. What happened in the interim?

I couldn’t write because of this job. But Obama is a great subject — white parent, black parent. We didn’t even go into all that (during the session). And how, with a name that rhymes with the most evil name in the American imagination, he became president of the US.

What comes after being editor of The New Yorker?

I don’t know. There isn’t five minutes of boredom in this job. But if it doesn’t grow, if it stands still, like a shark, it will drop dead. Lots has changed over time. I have an internal motor that keeps running.