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True to calling By Archana Sudheer Gayen

JOSHUA NEWTONN is an international award-winning writer based in the southern Indian port-town, Kochi. His non-fiction and journalism have appeared in over 60 publications around the world. He's the winner of 2005 Evangelical Press Association award (second) for the feature story on Gladys Staines (She Chose to Forgive) published in Charisma & Christian Life, USA.

He also won the Luis Valtuena VII International Humanitarian Photography Award (Special Prize) from Medicos Del Mundo in Spain. Joshua is the first Asian to win these honours. Joshua also wrote the screenplay for National Award- winning filmmaker Shyamaprasad's Ritu, which was released in August last. In an exclusive interview to The Herald of India, he talks about his life and work.

Question: Your father was a painter-sculptor. How did this impact your creative self? What was your childhood like?

Ans: A son is a seed, isn't he? I hadn't realised for long how much my father's wish for an aesthetic design of life had endowed within myself, how much his artistic aspirations had passed on to me -- the angst, the passion for a perfect line, a beautiful font, a stroke of a brush, a frame of a shot, a line of substance and serenity; it all had come from that man who was an eccentric to many of his contemporaries and relatives, of course. My creative self was formed within the cocoon of my father's unfulfilled dreams as an artist. My childhood isn't one I'd be happy talking about. Being the only child (my brother had died young) and getting caught between a temperamental artist dad and a stubborn, illiterate mom doesn't work in your favour when you are tiny. I think I got too tamed by the financial and emotional tensions at home. I got turned into a meek boy. It would not be a pleasant destination for a revisit.

Q: How did you decide to become a writer?

A: The decision came way later. In the small town insufficient of anything related to arts and letters (especially writing in English), and proud about its trade status and rising concrete structures, I found myself at odds. The desire given to me by my father was an ideal job as a creative director in a top-level advertising agency. I joined the Press Academy's journalism course since it had a paper in advertising. It all looks like a joke now. But soon, I found myself writing decent prose in Malayalam, my native tongue. Getting a job was hard. Yet, I somehow managed to resign and reenter in different beats or positions or survive as a freelance for quite a while. Eighteen years to be precise. Since the 'death of journalism' and the birth of media business, I had no zest left in me to be a pawn. I had found a passion in going deeper into lives, be it real or made up. Then, I thought the tools of fiction might help. Since then, I've written two films in Malayalam and a handful of stories in English, which I'm putting together as a novel.

Q: You won the 2005 Evangelical Press Association award (second) for the feature story on Gladys Staines. Can you tell us something about it?

A: It came as an ordinary assignment. I went to Ooty first, where Staines' daughter was studying and then to Baripada in Orissa where the missionary widow lived. It was tough breaking into her shell of silence, her distrust in reporters, her staunch numbness towards anything being reported at all, her pent up agony. It took me two days doing that. I stayed over and kept talking and visiting her. When I confessed that I was not able to get to the core of her life, she relented mercifully. The story was sent for the award by the editors of the magazine. It's an American award usually given to reporters there. I was told that I was the first Asian to win that award.

Q: Photography is one of your interests and you even won an international award in Spain. How did you get into this stream and what inspires you to do so?

A: I guess photography came natural to me. I could have longed to go beyond the content of the frames of paintings my father created. Maybe I had what some call a 'natural eye'. Award and contests weren't on my mind at all. I got the shot of a Chamar Dalit woman throwing herself around in a frenzy of faith at a religious fair in Uttar Pradesh. Later, an e-mail offered me to participate in the contest and the subject was 'women and new slavery' and I thought my picture suited the topic. I couldn't go to Madrid to receive the award. But the prize money helped, of course. Later, when I realised the sheer quality of photographs produced by men and women around the world through sites like Flickr, I put down my camera. I thought I should stick to writing.

Q: What has been your biggest achievement?

A: It has dawned on in my mind and it's growing in my laptop. It's in the making, what I'd consider anything close to a true achievement. It's my first novel, not considering how others would consider it. I'm not bothered about that. As of now, the achievement is finding out my true calling, which would define the shape of the rest of my life: writing fiction.

Q: Tell us about your film Beyond, where you coaxed your friends and family to act.

A: Beyond is a 27-minute digital film about a Catholic priest who gets bogged down by 10 parish members who tell him why they broke each of the Commandments and how he finally finds the Truth. It's an experimental video essay, which lacks technical finesse, made on a shoestring budget (my entire savings, which eventually put me in debt). I'm proud of having made it. Utterly proud. I haven't seen anyone in the country having made anything like that. I'm quite happy.

Q: You wrote the screenplay for Ritu, a movie by National award-winning filmmaker Shyamaprasad. How was the experience?

A: Shyamaprasad, who just won a national award this year, saw Beyond and invited me to write a film for him. Ritu was a learning experience in the sense that I learned a lot about writing screenplays, which I hadn't done earlier, and also that cinema is not a medium of self-expression for a writer, and that your writing stays pure only till it remains on your desk. It can get polluted when it's handed over to others, whoever it may be. Only a writer, one who's worthy to be called so, understands the nuances of a sentence, the positioning of words -- that a written line is not just a written line, but also a well-thought out arrangement to produce a certain effect intentionally. Our societies are yet to grow out of their lethargy, their wooly thinking to sit up and realise that a written line is a product of years of wishes and deep thought.

Q: You have plenty of experience in international journalism. What is you opinion of mass media in India and what are the issues that need to be tackled here?

A: Mass media anywhere is pure business. You should not be fooled by the barons who tell you that you should buy their papers and watch their channels so that the pillar of democracy would stay erect and your life would be safe. Makers of media have sold their souls like Faustus. Journalism is a source of power for its owners and mere means of living for the practitioners. I've been inside enough to see the-shit-in-making so close. I don't read papers anymore. Journalism is dead. Each will write his or her own piece of news and his or her circle of readers will read and each will formulate opinions according to convenience. There's no greater truth to remain alive for. You only live for your own ideals and you show the world your faculties and capacities. And then you pay the bills. Period.

Q: What project are you working on at the moment?

A: I'm putting together the best of my blog posts and selections from e-mails and my old diaries plus Twitter posts and some SMS messages into a book. Since our publishers would not know what to do with it, I'm not approaching anyone. Someone owes me some money. If I get it on time, I'll publish the book by the end of the year or early next year. It's a strange and sublime book in the making.

Q: Tell us about your family.

A: My wife Bini, with whom I fell in love in our journalism classroom, has kindly stayed on with me for so many years and now is a radio journalist in the UAE. Our children Gautam (10), Daya (18 months) and I stay in Kochi. No, we don't have any cats or dogs.

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