From a minion to a lesser minion
How do you convince a bunch of lazy 14 year olds to act professionally? Why is it this difficult to keep them in line, having them churning out idea after idea, keeping the thought process balanced and mature? And more importantly, how do you act mature, when two days before being made a subeditor, you were one of those 14 year olds?
The secret to the Rising Stars team meetings was letting go of any illusion of control and letting the chaos ensue. As a subeditor, in a time-honoured tradition, you were expected to bear with it all. Sometimes you had to be persuasive, and at other times scream at the minions like all hell broke loose. It was funny beyond measure, from one subeditor unplugging a landline phone and running after a contributor in the hopes of pummelling him with it, to the two subeditors who started a cat-fight in the middle of the office cubicle.
This is what happens when you let a bunch of crazies loose in a meeting room. They may appear to be seated, but their thought processes are spaghetti and their expressions unchecked. They are literally free to say whatever they want, pull at whatever thread they wish in the faint hopes of rendering an idea solid. One contributor (Orin, we are looking at you here), would start laughing, crying, and gasping for air till we sent her out of the room, every single meeting.
The process is as alien as bringing a pen and paper together in the hopes that they will get over their dysfunctional relationship and somehow produce a coherent piece of writing. It shouldn't work, but it did, for 22 years.
It might be offensive to consider that these writers, this merry band of hopeless teens who ultimately shaped the lives of countless readers, were as clueless as the commoner who hoped to gain access to the inner clique of their favourite writers. Looking back, some of us were probably overdoing it, from the writer who tried too hard to be Hemingway, to the one who thought the best thing to talk about with her much older boss was the Human Centipede.
The recruitment process was meant to weed out the smart ones from the feeble, but what it actually did was pick out the scatterbrained and the awkward; largely because the interview board would've left any sane person in tears. It was so bad, one candidate had to resort to telling us that he set his friend's pants on fire once to try and impress us with his capacity to go overboard. He wasn't picked, only because one of the senior editors from another section was in earshot and screamed at us till we told the candidate he would not make it. It was the same story with the CVs they sent us: one contributor, who was eventually hired, wrote in her CV that her favourite TV show was her mom. The people we hired and the way we hired them go a long way to show how RS operated. If the HR department knew, we probably wouldn't have been allowed to make that one guy do a headstand in the middle of the conference room, but the applicants took it all willingly. Later, when the time came, they would do the same in the next hiring process. The cycle continued, with each batch of writers coming up with their own ways to pick on and intimidate the applicants.
As someone who had to endure two years of Thursday meetings (and after-meeting meetings) before becoming a subeditor, there was a tremendous amount of pressure to keep the cycle going. For the editorial team, the week started on Thursdays, ended on Tuesdays, and in between was a hectic time of going to the canteen and stuffing our faces with puri and Mountain Dew at every opportunity. The conversation topics ranged from speculating on how many grammatical errors our upcoming issue would have, to deciding who would take the blame for yet another instance of switched articles and (sometimes intentionally) changed by-lines. The fact that the mental ages of the subeditors (and indeed, the editor) were about 12, did not help.
Once, because it is about time we admitted this, we printed the same book review twice in consecutive weeks. On social media, the fans thought it was an elaborate joke, and we played along. Of course we had meant to run the review of Asimov's book twice; it was that good. The subeditor was
almost fired though.
There were fights too. Rivalry between contributors for getting printed resulted in ridiculous ideas getting turned to articles (Swimming in gold? How pony farms are sound investments in this economy? Really?). There were rivalries about who would be the new subeditor. The editors themselves did not help; they kept pitting the team members against each other. But after over two years since Rising Stars has been put to rest, the team, cutting across generations, are still in touch somehow. They banter and make fun of the guy who was called DuitaPhish in the same way; they get together once in a while to eat food other than puri.
But then you realise Rising Stars gave these people – with a wide range of interests and ambitions – a platform to express themselves, trade stories, books, get critique for writing. As Sabrina F Ahmad reminisces back to her time of running RS, “What I remember most is the company of bright young people – people who read a lot and had such a curiosity for the world. I miss that. Ronny was a rockstar and made the less glamorous parts of the job seem fun. Raffat apa was my tough love mentor. The twelve teams I worked with were all aces.”
No wonder then, almost all the contributors and subeditors over RS' 22 years of existence, though studying or working in a wide range of fields, still write regularly, be it fiction, poems, or opinion pieces.
Being a subeditor for RS seemed like the biggest thing we would ever achieve back then, and with all its added work, it was a great opportunity. Sure we got screamed at by the boss sometimes, and we would then want to kill the contributors – but then the boss would invite you over to his house for food, and peace was restored. As the Raza, the once RS contributor/subeditor/editor still says, “Do the job you like, and you would need to keep another job to pay the bills” because we were paid in peanuts.
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