Learn Curve for Girls

Deepa Balakrishnan has been an award-winning journalist in Bengaluru for nearly two decades. In that short stint, she has had the privilege of covering a host of subjects from politics and rocket science to tsunamis and riots. She has spent most of her professional life as a broadcast journalist, though she also wrote for newspapers and websites. She is also an author, having published two books for children based on real-life news experiences. Her journey, authoring, started when she ended her long days at work to return home and her then-four-year-old wanted bedtime stories. She then started storifying her some of the real-life events she had covered, and found that the little one loved those. While on a career break, she published some of these stories to reach more children.

On your career as a journalist and writer?

I wanted to be a journalist since I was 15-16. I took journalism courses all through college. It was not for the glamour or the fame or the money, since there was not much money in journalism. But I wanted to be involved in societal change. It was a thing of identity. I would think of the utopian world. I wanted to contribute to a utopian world. I started my journalism journey in a publication – beats I covered were education, science and urban governance. I had so much to write about. Then I had the TV interview. I was asked, “Do you write for the news per week? What kind of deadlines do write to? Can you do one story or two per day? I was at that time doing 11 stories.” But TV is different. It may be one story, but you are still doing one story per day are the challenges can be navigating traffic, getting the right sound admist the noise etc. So, I was not putting up 11 stories in given day. One thing about journalism in any form is that the goals are the same. We are telling stories. I was at home and telling my son a story. My son loved it so much that he heard it again and again for a week. What I wanted to do was tell news stories in a way in which children could understand. As a journalist you tell a story that everyone in a village can understand, the whole nation can understand. I would tell my kid stories and that’s how the storytelling started.

Could you talk about your children’s books? How did they come about?

One was a story about a news event that had happened in Brazil. A sealion that had got lost in city traffic – I made a story out of it. The other story was about stone quarrying, illegal stone quarrying at that. We went to do the shoot in the forest and we took a video of the quarrying. The impact it had on villages. In the book, I wanted to talk about what we are doing to protect our forests. So many trees, so many animals – how does this quarrying impact them. A year after the incident there were so many news reports of animals leaving the forest and getting lost in villages. A leopard that comes from the protected forest area and enters the village is in the news. As a result of telling such stories we can get our children to read the news. How do you get your child hooked to reading the news? My son opens the physical newspaper and reads it.

Could you talk about the importance of truth and authenticity in your work?

All these are lived experiences. Authenticity is very important in any story. There is no room for plagiarism. You are here and the stories are about what you see. Journalism is all about how anyone anywhere can understand what you have to say. Even a younger child can relate to these things. Questions to ask are – whether I am making a difference to society? Whatever I am writing – whether I am making a difference in terms of awareness?

Is this not pioneering work, in terms of presenting the news as children’s books?

Maybe. That is hard to say. As journalists, we are all storytellers. There are lot of children’s writers these days doing the same thing. Sudha Murthy banks on her own childhood experiences. She writes about what she has known. She is a storyteller who draws from her lived experiences.

Could you talk about your experience of storytelling – in Print Journalism, Broadcast Journalism, and as children’s writer – the entire expanse of storytelling?

Storytelling is what we do as journalists. How it changed and remained the same across mediums. The story should have people and anecdotes, case studies and experiences. Once we were doing a documentary on The Chandrayan and spent 23 days on it – shooting and editing. It was the experiences people shared with us that made the story real. We were talking to one of the scientists behind the exhibition. He was from Pollachi and never left his district till he finished his collage. The story of a scientist from a small town can be a source of a lot of personal inspiration. To a news story, the personal experiences make all the difference.