Monthly Archives: July 2011

Going to journalism school in September

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[This is the 1000-word autobiographical note I sent in a few months ago as part of my application for admission to the journalism program at King's College, Halifax.]

Thank you very much for looking though my late application to the one-year Bachelor of Journalism program. This application is an attempt to convince you to look past the gloriously embarrassing numbers on my undergraduate transcript and consider the experience I gained during a four-month internship with This Magazine, my commitment to the survival of the independent and alternative media outlets which amplify the unique voices found across this impossibly large country, and my interest in helping to develop new business models which will keep these publications with us for the long run. This is how I plan to weasel my way into your very appealing (although probably full) program.

I am interested in magazine writing and other long-form journalism partly because writing is the only form of high-level expression available to me. I have a good friend who’s a great saxophone player, but we can’t have a conversation in his preferred language because I don’t speak jazz. I also don’t speak painting or sculpture or dance. Which means that if I want to express the nonsense in my head with any degree of complexity or coherence, it has to be with words on a page.

Not too many generations ago, my family were farmers in British Sri Lanka. They converted to Catholicism and attended Irish mission schools. Some won jobs in the colonial civil service. Some left Sri Lanka in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s to find work in British Malaya. A generation later, others left to go to school in North America. And the rest left in the 1980s to escape the civil war, ending up in Canada, Norway, Switzerland, England, and so on.

Around the time many relatives were leaving a declining Sri Lanka, I was born into the middle of Singapore’s economic miracle. The city-state has been called a sociologist’s dream because it serves as a counter-example to the Western notion that prosperity requires liberty. My parents decided that my sister and I were not suited to such a rigid system and gave up stable careers to move us to Toronto in 1999. Since then, I’ve been an immigrant, a citizen, a philosophy student, and a part-time member of a very troubled Tamil diaspora.

Family history aside, I recognize that there are lots of other stories which need telling. People who live comfortably often develop ways to filter out the distressing social realities which surround them. I want to help tell these stories in ways that are engaging and thought-provoking. Journalism is a public utility which has given me my share of role models. Veteran reporter David Simon intended the fictional television series The Wire as an uncomfortably close look at the dysfunctional institutions which operate in inner-city Baltimore. Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick gives non-specialist readers access to the highly technical world of the US Supreme Court, whose complex proceedings affect millions of lives. And Rick Salutin, now a columnist with the Toronto Star, is a professional outsider who unravels any idea that seems too tidy. I’d like to be like him one day.

It was by looking into Salutin’s past work that I found out about This Magazine, the 45-year-old alternative magazine which I later joined on a four-month internship. It is a small shop with high standards, and the internship was a crash course in fact-checking, print writing, blogging, and all the publishing heroics which keep the whole thing alive for another issue. I enjoyed fact-checking, both because the meticulousness appealed to some very nit-picky part of my soul and because it required me to re-trace the steps of a more experienced writer.

The internship also gave me my first look at the difference between small independent publications and publications which aspire to a greater respectability. I learnt that advertisements can say as much about a publication as editorials. This Magazine features ads from unions and small literary presses, while The Walrus features ads for prestigious private schools and high-status theatrical performances, with a luxury car fixed permanently to the back page. I still enjoy the quality of social commentary found in industry giants like The New Yorker and Harper’s, but I now remind myself that their target audience has a higher-than-average chance of owning an Audi or a BMW.

Why King’s College? It sounds like the low student-to-instructor ratio would do a lot to address the academic weaknesses which are obvious from my transcript. I learn best when I am able to form relationships and have conversations with instructors and peers. Finding this difficult in the University of Toronto’s faculty-based academic system, I focused instead on college-based extra-curriculars. I took on leadership roles and social justice causes which taught me at least as much as I was getting by sitting in the back of large lecture halls. I don’t regret that choice, but I do wish my transcript was less crappy.

I hope the program will lead me to greater familiarity with the journalistic landscape and connections with industry professionals. But more specifically, I hope to develop the ability to produce prose that is lean and focused. I have a tendency to use more words than I should to make a point. I would also like an introduction to research and investigation. I have a lot of experience with academic research but less with in-depth policy analysis and very little with the more human side of information-gathering. I got a taste of both at This, when sifting through years of policy reports for my own review of federal childcare policy, and when fact-checking a feature article which referred to one of the named characters as a “dirty cop.” We had to decide if we were justified in printing that phrase, and I ended up speaking to him long-distance on the phone to try to get him to confirm the allegations. We printed the phrase.

Thank you for reading. I hope you will look kindly on my application. After 11 years in Toronto, I’d like to see what Halifax is like.

Yours in perpetual hope,
Kevin Philipupillai

Gandhi wrote to Hitler

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It is cosmically absurd that Gandhi and Hitler lived on the same planet for 56 years. Here are copies of two letters that Gandhi wrote to Hitler during the war, essentially saying “please don’t.” The government of British India stepped in to prevent the letters from being delivered, which means this episode tells us a great deal about the writer but nothing about the intended recipient.

The first letter is dated 23 July 1939, five weeks before the invasion of Poland. The copy I’ve included here is from the fascinating website Letters of Note, but the letter can also be found in the Gandhi Serve Foundation’s online collection of Gandhi’s writings (Volume 76).

This longer second letter was written on Christmas Eve 1940. From the Gandhi Serve Foundation’s online collection of Gandhi’s writings (Volume 79).

WARDHA,

December 24, 1940

DEAR FRIEND,

That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.

I hope you will have the time and desire to know how a good portion of humanity who have view living under the influence of that doctrine of universal friendship view your action. We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity. Hence we cannot possibly wish success to your arms.

But ours is a unique position. We resist British Imperialism no less than Nazism. If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny. Our resistance to it does not mean harm to the British people. We seek to convert them, not to defeat them on the battle-field. Ours is an unarmed revolt against the British rule. But whether we convert them or not, we are determined to make their rule impossible by non-violent non-co-operation. It is a method in its nature indefensible. It is based on the knowledge that no spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-operation, willing or compulsory, of the victim. Our rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls. They can have the former only by complete destruction of every Indian—man, woman and child. That all may not rise to that degree of heroism and that a fair amount of frightfulness can bend the back of revolt is true but the argument would be beside the point. For, if a fair number of men and women be found in India who would be prepared without any ill will against the spoliators to lay down their lives rather than bend the knee to them, they would have shown the way to freedom from the tyranny of violence. I ask you to believe me when I say that you will find an unexpected number of such men and women in India. They have been having that training for the past 20 years.

We have been trying for the past half a century to throw off the British rule. The movement of independence has been never so strong as now. The most powerful political organization, I mean the Indian National Congress, is trying to achieve this end. We have attained a very fair measure of success through non-violent effort. We were groping for the right means to combat the most organized violence in the world which the British power represents. You have challenged it. It remains to be seen which is the better organized, the German or the British. We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid. We have found in non-violence a force which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world. In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat. It is all ‘do or die’ without killing or hurting. It can be used practically without money and obviously without the aid of science of destruction which you have brought to such perfection. It is a marvel to me that you do not see that it is nobody’s monopoly. If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skilfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an international tribunal of your joint choice. If you attain success in the war, it will not prove that you were in the right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was greater. Whereas an award by an impartial tribunal will show as far as it is humanly possible which party was in the right.

You know that not long ago I made an appeal to every Briton to accept my method of non-violent resistance. I did it because the British know me as a friend though a rebel. I am a stranger to you and your people. I have not the courage to make you the appeal I made to every Briton. Not that it would not apply to you with the same force as to the British. But my present proposal is much simple because much more practical and familiar.

During this season when the hearts of the peoples of Europe yearn for peace, we have suspended even our own peaceful struggle. Is it too much to ask you to make an effort for peace during a time which may mean nothing to you personally but which must mean much to the millions of Europeans whose dumb cry for peace I hear, for my ears are attended to hearing the dumb millions? I had intended to address a joint appeal to you and Signor Mussolini, whom I had the privilege of meeting when I was in Rome during my visit to England as a delegate to the Round Table Conference. I hope that he will take this as addressed to him also with the necessary changes.

I am,

Your sincere friend,

M. K. GANDHI

From a copy: C.W. 7861. Courtesy: G. D. Birla

Tomorrow Next: George Orwell’s assessment of Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence in the face of the Holocaust.