Reporting may be noble, but on the ground it is an act of audacity.
We barge into people’s lives and expect them to tell us about the worst thing that has ever happened to them. We demand the truth — and we demand it on a deadline.
After six years of reporting on breaking news and sexual violence, I stepped away. I needed time to unlearn and rethink journalism, especially when it came to sexual violence.
So much of what we know of reporting is shaped by who teaches us and what gets passed down. And reality is, even when women fill newsrooms, men still shape them. So, the lens we inherit — shaped mostly by men — teaches us to prioritise a certain kind of “fact” while dismissing other truths.
Take sexual violence: it is a crime so private, so bodily, that sometimes even language falters while trying to explain it. Yet, when a crime like this takes place, we reporters rush to their homes with our mics and pens, expecting accuracy, memory and articulation. Too often, our coverage begins with the descriptions of the crime and ends with the court verdict.
But over time I realised that the way the media reconstructs a crime is rarely how it is remembered.
For example, once when I asked a survivor about the rape that happened to her, she recalled the smell of engine oil on her rapists’ hands, the pale blue color of the rug on which it happened and the way her glass bangles cut into her own arm. These were her facts, this was her truth.
As a younger reporter, I did not have the courage to fight my editor to include these fragments of memory. Instead, I defaulted to the FIR and produced what we call a ‘factual’ reconstruction.
Only now do I recognize that there is an intention in how we choose to recall our history, power in how memory takes shape. As reporters, we train ourselves to be observant in a certain way. But because of what we’ve been taught about news, objectivity, and facts, we’ve also trained ourselves to look away from certain realities.
If both men and women experience the same world so differently, how can we expect the same tools of reporting to tell both their stories?
Truth, I’ve learned, does not always stand against lies — sometimes it simply stands beside another truth.
None of this is to belittle the value of breaking news reportage. It is important. But our jobs do not start and end with it. Over the last two years, in my attempt to listen more, I’ve chosen to do only longform reportage.
The latest is Sister Ruth’s. In 2018, she filed a case against Bishop Franco Mulakkal, accusing him of raping her multiple times. He was eventually acquitted — but it did not end there. This case spans more than a decade of her life, and the lives of many around her. It is also a story of power, revenge, justice and faith.
While reporting, I tried to stay alive to the contours of her memory. The story introduces the alleged rapes to the reader in the same order, in the same cadence, in which she entrusted them to me.
In fact, we never spoke about the minute details of the violence. Initially, it made me nervous. But soon I realized that if I kept chasing the technical facts, all of which was available in the court documents, I would miss something far more significant: her everyday life, her lived reality.
And so, through her routine, at her own pace, the story slowly unfolded.
This is the first time I worked with a photographer — Isaac Nico. I felt like the storytelling demanded visual documentation simply because of how physical the solitude and ostracisation is.
It is a long read. Some stories may not have a clear news peg, nor fit into the urgency of a news cycle. But they shape our society — and it is our duty to document the stories of our people, our time and all our truths.
Read my deep dive here: Against God’s men: A nun, a bishop, and the trial of India’s Catholic Church