This month we introduce you to Jayshree Bose, an Academic business writer.
Please tell us about yourself. Have you always been a writer?
I come from a family of creative people, many of whom are good writers, although none of them have taken up writing as a profession. Being brought up in such an ambience certainly helped and I have been an avid reader since my early schooldays. My love for music, particularly classical music, also helped me to cultivate an imaginative and creative bent of mind which, I think, lays the foundation for all kinds of writing. Although I was not into a fulltime career in writing till my late twenties, by when my children had grown up a little, I had been contributing all along to school and college magazines, Junior Statesman, and then to The Times of India. It was only later that I joined Business Standard as a full timer. So, in a way, I have always been a writer.
There was very little scope for networking through groups or literary circles those days, and we were exposed to the joys of writing at every stage through reading—classics, mostly, both in English and in my mother tongue Bengali. What we missed out in terms of exchanging views on individual experiences on writing through social networking, we gained from vicarious experiences derived from reading. I remember how my uncle encouraged this love of reading in me by presenting me with 17 volumes of Rabindranath Tagore’s works on my tenth birthday! Although there were novels in the collection that went over my head, I read Tagore’s poems and his short stories voraciously even at that age. This bred in me a maturity. I do not think I can explain how this maturity and the capacity to move into unfamiliar areas later formed the basis of my career as a business writer. All this is very subjective. But it definitely did help enormously. However, business writing was very far from my mind then; in fact, I doubt whether this genre even existed then as a critical mass.
What drew you to writing as a career?
When I read these classics, I marvelled at the way these masters handled character exposition and the connectivity of events effortlessly, and at the surprise element in short stories, and this made me want to write like them. Even though that was a dream, I began contributing early to school magazines. It was the encouragement given to me by my class teacher in Standard 8 that really drew me to writing as a career.
Have you faced any hurdles in becoming a writer? How did you cope?
I think the biggest hurdle has been what every working woman faces: multitasking. You want to write something, you are getting there, but there are domestic responsibilities staring you in the face. What do you do? By the time you are through with them, the creative streak has logged out. Apart from this, there have been the other usual obstacles, such as a difficult boss at one point of time. Entering the workplace a little late in life, when I was in my late twenties, also created some fitment problems, initially. With time, these got ironed out. And, although I wouldn’t rate these as hurdles, the relentless pressure of very short deadlines in media sometimes made me want to throw up my hands in despair. For example, when there was turbulence in the forex markets, I had to ensure that my team was covering it comprehensively. Which meant staying back until early morning over a period of time. Budget Day, Monetary Policy announcements by the Reserve Bank of India– all this meant staying back till late night, writing about the ’Action-Impact.’ As I moved up, I realised what the responsibilities really were. Once, an interview taken of the then Finance Minister Mr P Chidambaram went with the name of the Tata Honeywell Managing Director (whose interview had been carried in the previous issue) on the template below the FM’s photograph. I had gone home a little earlier after giving clear directions that the issue—a weekly supplement—should be released only the next day after I had done the final check—but it did not happen that way!
But you overlook these blips when you see your piece being read by policymakers and the general readers, alike, and sometimes resulting in major reforms, as well. I am grateful to my family for all the adjustments they must have had to make all these years so that I could do what I wanted to.
Professionally, I think my full time career in journalism was marked by steady progress and linear growth; because I planned it out, I did not have to be out in the wilderness or face too many hurdles. Deadlines also imposed discipline, so much so that they are sacrosanct to me today. I personally feel external deadlines bring structure to the life of a writer.
But the scenario in freelancing is different both here and elsewhere. It is yet an unorganized sector. Information about reliable writers’ syndicates is difficult to come by. It makes me really happy to see the excellent precedents Chillibreeze is setting in this matter. I do hope it will be a catalyst in transforming the perception of freelance writing into a serious business just like any other profession.
From a master’s degree in Literature to being a business writer involved in core business writing – how did you choose the path?
I don’t think I chose it consciously. I was initiated into it after we moved to Mumbai—then Bombay—by no less a person than Mr. Pritish Nandy. I had gone to “The Illustrated Weekly” for an interview with Mr. Nandy. After the interview, a successful one, he said to me: “Jayshree, much as I would like you to join us, on second thoughts I would suggest you join a business newspaper or magazine, ideally on the desk to begin with. I feel you will make the transition to writing within a year. With liberalization around the corner, it’s the business publications that will thrive. There will be a major shakeout as far as the general publications go.”
What he said made sense to me. His words were prophetic; barely a few months later there was a shakeout in the non-business media that led to quite a few casualties; the venerable Illustrated Weekly being one of them. In the meantime, I had joined Business Standard on the desk as Chief Sub Editor. It may sound incredible, but I learnt concepts related to the stockmarkets, banking, insurance and other areas related to business journalism very fast even as I edited. I do hope I do not sound conceited when say that my maturity, reading habit and some commonsense helped enormously. I don’t think having Economics as an elective at the graduation level helped me as much as this hands-on training. Once again, I acknowledge my gratefulness to God for giving me the capacity to acclimatize myself fast to new areas.
Within a few months, my senior began sponsoring me for short term and medium term courses in business and finance, and taking me along for interviews. I learnt as I went along: how to prepare for a meaningful interview, how to discuss crucial issues with finance ministers, bank chairmen and others, and I have to say this that interacting with brilliant financial sector luminaries has been a great learning experience. There were days when I had to take as many as five interviews, all in different parts of Mumbai, and file my article within a day or two. I think all this rigour helped enormously in shaping my mind to the needs of business writing as nothing else could. Today, when I have moved to the infinitely more challenging area of academic business writing, my research associates, all of whom have very strong backgrounds in business and finance, tell me that they find my guidance –both in terms of content and style— invaluable. I would like to say two things in conclusion. One, good command over a language is not just an effective vehicle of content. It is actually a facilitator for knowledge because it leads to clarity of thought and enables people to imbibe unfamiliar concepts better. Let me share with you the fact that the best business writers, at least in India, mostly come from language-related backgrounds. We also have many Chartered Accountants, MBAs in Finance, etc., with good command over the language moving over from lucrative positions in investment banking, commercial banking, insurance, etc., to writing. Two, with maturity, our minds grow laterally. Lateral thinking enables a person to draw experiences from the archives of his/her mind, so, knowledge becomes consummate. More than knowledge derived from text books, my knowledge of business has become consummate through long and varied hands-on experience. While at ICFAI Business School Research Center, I have even written a dictionary on terms relating to mergers and acquisitions. It required a lot of original research, and I targeted at and succeeded in bringing out a Category 1 dictionary, which meant that it would have to contain a lot of original illustrative sentences and examples.
What is your favorite piece of writing? Tell us about it.
I am passionate about writing, in general, and about learning from it—so, it’s difficult to point at something specific. But my favourite theme has to be ‘Catastrophe Insurance’. I’ve brought out a series of three books on the theme. The first two are edited ones where I wrote between three to seven articles. The most recent one, titled “ Insuring Against Catastrophes: Recent Trends and Challenges,” is an authored book where I have written on a theme which is a burning issue today, but where there is very little documentation. I feel satisfied that my book is the first on this theme written by an Indian author, and one of the few in the world. It deals with crucial issues on the pros and cons of the government’s direct involvement in commercial catastrophe insurance, alternative risk transfer mechanisms as options to reinsurance, principles of catastrophe risk management, the fate of Catastrophe Bonds in the aftermath of the global meltdown, etc. These books, which are both informative and analytical, typically have to go through a multi layered review system where subject experts from industry review the book, and give suggestions for improvement. I got a very positive rating. Some of my other flagship books are:” Bank Mergers: the Indian Scenario”, where Dr C Rangarajan, Chief Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, wrote the foreword, and “Medical Tourism: Perspectives and Specific Country Experiences” which carries an interview with Dr. Prathap Reddy, Chairman of Apollo Hospitals. But, in general, I enjoyed writing every book and article I ever wrote, so much so I feel a lifetime is too short for any writer.
What kind of writing do you dislike? Any Turn offs?
Can I put it this way, that although there are no turn-offs, business writing is a real turn-on, so much so that I never really feel the acute need to write anything else. But recently, I have been getting this craving to get back a little to creative writing, as well.
If writer’s block strikes, how do you cope with it?
I do suffer occasionally from periods of intense writers’ blocks, when the prolific writer within me finds it difficult to as much as switch on the computer. For some time, I feel too paralysed to even try to overcome the block. My writers’ blocks usually stem from some specific factors. One is when I am feeling blue because of personal or professional problems. Prolonged and unwarranted criticism at work demoralises me after some time. Another reason could be when a piece written by me does not turn out to my total satisfaction—I find myself unable to get on with my work, at such times. Then, one fine morning, I realize that things just can’t go on like this, and I shake off the blues and limp back. Gradually, I find myself getting back to normalcy—so, not succumbing to the block for too long is the most effective way to cope. A writer’s block can create havoc with deadlines.
Do you prefer writing for yourself or to a brief for clients?
I have usually written on themes I myself identified. However, it isn’t that any writer today could afford to operate out of an ivory tower, and we all had to keep the ‘reader interest’ factor in mind (and rightly so), both in the media and in academic publications. There is a very strict review process before the article/book proposal is okayed, although in the media this is partly in the form of a post mortem because of the very short deadlines there. To sum up, reader interest and marketability is an important plank on which all writing must be based. We are now in a transitional phase, where a lot of freelancing work is directly oriented towards clients’ needs. This is a good thing, because it ensures the work’s marketability to a large extent. Will this transition be easy for me? No, it would definitely require some adjustments on my part, but I hope to be able to make them .
What is the best feedback you received about your work?
I think I should mention the brief—but very telling –feedback I received from Dr Y V Reddy, then RBI Governor, in 2006. His congratulatory, totally unsolicited feedback on a detailed review I had written on one of the volumes on RBI’s history arrived all of a sudden one evening when I was in Hyderabad, and had me literally transfixed to the ground. The other occasion was when Dr C Rangarajan, Chief Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister and earlier RBI Governor, agreed to write a foreword for my book “ Bank Mergers: the Indian Scenario.” Although the foreword was positive, it was actually his act of conceding to write the foreword that touched me the most. I have also received accolades from Mr N Rangachary, the first Chairman of Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority for a book of mine, and from Dr. Kiran Bedi and others. It’s difficult to say which was more memorable.
So much for celebrities. But just as important has been the feedback from my husband, my daughter and my son, who are actually my most outspoken critics. Their comments have helped enormously in trimming the rough edges off my writing, ensuring clarity, in being able to identify the most pressing issues as themes to write about, and much else.
Another unusual and elating piece of feedback was when I saw a large number of titles and text from various articles of mine on advertisements of a leading mutual fund house. These advertisements were on large hoardings strategically located in Mumbai. At first I dismissed them as coincidences, but there were just too many of them that kept appearing over a period of time.So, jokes apart, I realized that I perhaps had a copywriting streak in me.
Who is your biggest critic? What has their most valuable piece of advice to you been?
As I said, my immediate family members are all my biggest critics. I think they all feel that I should occasionally write books of fiction, poetry also, in addition to business writing. My husband, who is highly appreciative of my books on themes of business and management as well as of my passion towards business writing, says his greatest regret is that the creative writer in me has been totally submerged by the business writer. A good writer himself, he used to encourage me a lot when I was just starting off .Today, he often asks me to pick up the threads once more and also write creative pieces like the ones I wrote earlier. He was happy to know that I am already working out the contours of my first novel. My daughter, with whom I invariably discuss all my themes (she is an architect, but writes very well) has always kept me on tenterhooks—unsparingly– about learning new skills on the computer so that my search and other techniques can be as meaningful as possible. My son, who is also a promising writer, is the most outspoken of them all and feels that my aversion to publicity has been a roadblock to higher achievements. All this makes me sit up and think, and keeps me either from sinking into complacency, or, from developing any sort of diffidence. But generally, they are extremely appreciative of what I have done over a career spanning almost 25 years and want me to keep doing more.
How do you see the internet changing the way writing works?
I think the Internet has changed the way writers and writing works, in both a positive and a negative way. The upside has been relatively easy access to information—cutting out on travel and telephone time and costs. It has also helped in terms of better publicity, for prolific writers particularly, through the multiplier effect. Identifying new possibilities, spotting changing trends—all these have become easier for writers through the Internet. Academic papers and articles, particularly, require a lot of underlying research, and the Internet helps tremendously as one of the major facilitators of getting the base research material. But like everything else, it has a downside, too. For one, a writer has to first identify reliable, authentic websites on which he/she can depend for the base data, Secondly, all writers worth their salt have to make it a sacrosanct habit not to plagiarise or even reproduce the content from external sources by merely rephrasing,, without adding any additional value. Generally speaking, I have found that with some thoughtful, customised grooming, today’s youngsters come up very well.
The hazards of plagiarism are less likely in media, particularly in news pieces, where most articles relate to the ‘here and now’. In such situations, the Internet becomes almost redundant. It is in academic writing that the need for research based on archived material is greater. That, in turn, enhances the danger of reproducing from another source without adding value. Rephrasing can be a very clever way of evading many plagiarism-detection tools, but that does not make a piece of writing “original”. The question is: what, as a writer, are you offering the reader? Why should he/she read your work? Let me conclude that while reliable websites on the Internet should definitely be able to provide the concepts, information and other data, all writers, particularly academic writers, should read up as much as they can on the themes they are writing on, so that they can think originally, analyze and include valuable inputs of their own which open up new vistas on the theme. It is not debatable that the Internet has, to some extent, stymied original thinking in terms of both content and communication skills, though one cannot generalize.
What are your views on the responsibilities of an academic writer? Any advice for aspiring academic writers?
The responsibilities of an academic writer are: (1) Exploring various facets of a theme in as comprehensive manner as possible, so that reference becomes easy—both for faculty, as well as students. The biggest difference between writing in media and in academic writing is that while articles in newspapers and magazines have a single news peg (they concentrate on a single aspect of the theme, or, go back to it even if they deviate), academic papers and articles unfurl many aspects of a theme before they arrive at their findings (2) Giving different, fresh perspectives by way of original research, in addition to existing ones. However, these new perspectives can only be presented initially. They have to be validated by a wide spectrum of subject experts before they can be recognised as acceptable research, often through a face-to-face discussion with the author (3) Including his/her own analysis and opinions, particularly in professional reference books. In other words, the writing has to be thesis-driven and authoritative (4) Conforming to a formal style. Using colloquialisms, or, a racy style goes against its acceptability (5) Laying out a well-sequenced chapterisation (6) Classifying content in an organised way that all aspects of the information are very easily accessible to readers (7) Including a set of well-thought out questions at the end of each chapter so that they succeed in effectively testing the student’s knowledge of the chapter’s contents within the framework of the objectives, and (8) Including a comprehensive glossary and index. It becomes obvious from these suggestions that the main objectives of an academic writer are to ensure comprehensiveness of information, addition of new research findings, high standards of classification and other tools to ensure easy accessibility, immediate testing of students’ assimilation through interactive questions, etc.
New entrants in academic writing need to practise all these as they go up the responsibility ladder. But initially they should ideally work intensively on 4–6 projects as Research Associates under a good guide, to understand the nature of academic writing indepth.
What has writing taught you about life?
Writing has taught me that life is not all black or white and that there are various shades of grey in between, that human nature is so diverse that it defies imagination, and that hard and disciplined work is more important than inspiration. Business writing has given me great insights into the ethics of business which is very different from the ethics of life in general. A deep study of business practices the world over has taught me about concepts such as emotional intelligence, leadership, strategising and innovation in a way that I can fruitfully harness them in my own professional and personal life, as well. Let me share some insights. I will never forget the day in 1999 when I was writing an analytical piece on the merger of Times Bank with HDFC Bank. As I went deeper, I got a profound insight into behind-the scenes incidents that take place in savvy deals –not just in the USA, but, in India, too. The logic behind the shakeout in the upper strata might have seemed unacceptable to me as an individual, But from the business perspective, the shakeout seemed inevitable. In 1995, when I was following up takeover tycoon Rajarathinam’s sources of funds, I got yet another insight into the politico-business nexus, but not before I was threatened with dire consequences by him.
What qualities of yours do you think help make you a better writer?
Once again, I hope I don’t sound boastful. But, it’s qualities like imagination; theme ideation; the reading habit; the capacity to move decisively into new areas; hard work; my self-driven nature; a command over the language; strong grasp over concepts relating to my area of work; exposure to both life’s agonies and its ecstacies and several other factors have all helped me in my career as a writer. Now, without your asking me, let me confess that some personality traits of mine, had they not been controlled, may have turned out to be obstacles in my path. They are: occasional bouts of lethargy (not writers’ blocks), a generally reclusive nature, aversion to publicity, etc.
What inspires you to write?
First and foremost, the pressure of deadlines—like nothing else. This is one factor that gets all writers up and going, whether they are in a mood to write or not. But jokes apart, I call it the most potent, disciplining factor in our lives. I have personally felt that when there were no deadlines, or, when they weren’t stringent enough, I have sometimes ended up procrastinating. But apart from that, there are other less mundane factors which also inspire me to write—such as when I feel very strongly about an issue, when I am moved by a sight or some news, when business or the economy is in a stage of major transition, when I feel that a theme is very contemporary but hasn’t been written about often enough—all these have inspired me to write. As far as creative writing is concerned, feelings as disparate as elation and despondency, life’s experiences—all these would inspire me to write. I now need to write some fiction, some poetry also.
What would your autobiography/biography be called?
We could have these options:
- “I, Me and Myself”
- “ Life’s Agonies and Ecstasies: a Writer’s Catalyst ”
- “The Passion of Writing”
- “Against All Odds.”
What is your dream as a writer? Any publications you would like to see your work in?
I would like to continue my work relating to articles that usher in reforms, as also keep writing books that are useful to professionals, academicians and students. I would like to see my name in publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Economist and other leading international publications. Also, I realise that a very busy fulltime career has kept me back from trying for serious, top-end Business Writer Awards. My son feels strongly about this. Perhaps I can concentrate on that now. I am currently also writing a book proposal on a post recession management-related theme (I am very, very excited about this) for a leading publishing house. I hope I will be able to see it through. Finally, I dream of also writing fiction, poetry once again, so that life turns full circle for me.
What kind of mistakes do you think new writers usually make?
Young writers today are very bright and creative. But I think some of them aspire to reach the top very fast, which is true of all industries today. While academics and other qualifications are very important, they often don’t help to build a broad-based vision, or, chart out a path of all-round growth. This can come only after one has gathered real life experiences for some time, at least. Without this, leadership can be an ineffective, almost traumatic experience.
Do you have any advice for editors who are starting out on their careers?
Nothing can compensate for linear growth. Once this becomes the norm, there would be very little of the dangers of supersession that all editors are wary about. I would also advise young editors to understand the strengths and weaknesses of every editorial member and also take personal interest in grooming them, as far as possible. I am against editors indulging in too much post mortem since this does not serve any purpose and can actually turn out very demoralising; all editors need to be aware of what is appearing in the next issue rather than what appeared in the earlier one. One just has to find time. Also, like in every industry, there is an acute need for putting well thought-out training programs in place. However creative writing may be, a novice needs to be initiated through training before being thrown into the sea and asked to swim.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself? Perhaps something interesting about you, that people are always surprised to hear?
Many people say they find my capacity to move fast into new areas and disciplines very remarkable and interesting. Another aspect that my young colleagues, in particular, often comment on is this: “Ma’m, you talk and think like a youngster.” I do hope my young friends think this is a positive streak.
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