FOUR of us – Arati Kumar-Rao, Rahul Bhatia, Kalyan Varma and I – prepped a project over months, positioned it on the launch pad, and went off into the back-room to do some final pre-flight checks and adjustments.
Gautam John and Nilanjana Roy – two very good friends but more to the point, people whose judgment we have relied heavily on during the preparatory/planning stages – happened along and saw the shiny new object on its launch pad, unattended.
They lit the fuse.
“This is The Peepli Project: where people come to tell the stories that touch our lives, and to listen.” http://t.co/NRBsivj9Up
— Gautam John (@gkjohn) May 20, 2015
Meet the four storytellers of the Peepli Project: @AratiKumarRao, @prempanicker, @rahulabhatia and @KalyanVarma. http://t.co/yjPm8JlDlc + — Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) May 20, 2015
And that is how it happened that today (May 20), the four of us came back from our back-room work and found that our project had taken off in our absence, in a vapor-trail of Twitter mentions and RTs and Facebook posts.
What are friends for anyway?
******
WE had a slightly different launch plan. The idea was to not announce (more so at a time when every week brings a new announcement, a new site, a new “offering”).
Like so many websites launched in recent weeks and months, we are independent, too. And our definition of independence includes this: the stories we tell will not be based on the headlines of today.
Arati, Rahul and Kalyan are story-tellers deeply engaged with, and passionately dedicated to, the themes they have chosen for themselves (more about that here). Their intent is to go deep — deep research, deep field-work, deep immersion in the spaces and lives they write about — and to produce narratives that, over time, will fuse into deep bodies of work.
During our chats, we decided that rather than explain what we were up to, we’d let it dawn on the reader over time. We’d just tell stories, one at a time. As successive stories layered onto the ones that had gone before, and as the interconnectedness of the three themes became manifest, the reader would understand.
Our manifesto admires through imitation such practitioners of slow-paced journalism as Paul Salopek, the modern master whose Out of Eden Walk is the narrative most often referenced when the four of us get together to talk and to plan.
Salopek articulated our raison d’être when he said:
“Slow journalism allows me to make hidden connections that you miss when you travel too fast. The world is complicated, and we require more than just short bits of information.”
That summarizes our intent. We will take the time to research, to report, to frame in stills and capture in video, and to write. We will tell our stories not according to “best practices” that dictate “frequency of updates”, but at the pace the story sets for itself. And we will take you along on these journeys.
*****
DURING those days of planning, and of working pencil-on-paper on story arcs for the next one year, Arati, Kalyan and Rahul cast about for a shared purpose, a covenant they could enter into with their readers. They homed in on this passage from the DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, that best sets out the expectation a reader has of a story-teller:
Here’s what I would like you to do for me: Make me laugh. Make me cry.
Show me my place in this world. Show me the world’s place in my life.
Lift me out of my skin, and put me in another’s, and show me how to live there.
Show me places I have never been to. Carry me to the ends of time and space.
Give my demons names, give my fears a face, and show me how to confront them.
Present before me heroes who will give me courage and hope. Demonstrate for me possibilities I have never thought of.
Ease my sorrows, increase my joy. Teach me compassion. Entertain me, enchant me, enlighten me.
Above all, tell me a story.
This is what we believe the reader expects of the story-teller. This is what we hope to deliver.
To do this will take more than the best efforts of the three story-tellers — it will take the reader’s best efforts, too. We believe that it is the reader, not the story-teller, that will make or break a project of this kind:
If you come along on the journey as conscience-keeper and guide, we will succeed; if you don’t, we will flounder and fail.
That is why Arati, Kalyan and Rahul send this thought to you: “We need you along with us, not merely as observers, but as full partners”.
Over to you.
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