“We done had a hell of a year. I'ma make it count while I'm here” – Lil Baby
2020 has been a lot. As someone who’s had to constantly update himself on Current Affairs, I’ve had to read a lot of sad and scary things. I had to understand that so many things happen in the world that I cannot influence or change and that set in a sense of existentialism at times cause you feel so small and useless in the grand scheme of things. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of the world but I found that writing about it helped me get through these tough times.
I started by writing about the COVID-19 crisis. I remember telling Edha, “I don’t want to write about COVID every week, I don’t think there’ll be anything else in current affairs this year.” Boy, was I wrong. That article helped me build my confidence and writing style. Then I wrote about media bias and how things like rape accusations and sexual harassment can be compromised by prejudice in media. There were still so many issues that were close to my heart but not much was happening in the outside world yet. So I decided to start writing about things that interested me in world politics or history which I felt have a relevance in today’s society or felt was a story worth telling.
The first of these articles was about Brexit and I tried this really unique article style for that and I’m still particularly proud of it. Next, I talked about the one topic in my entire writing that’s closest to my heart, ‘Bengaluru’s Migrant Crisis’ and a deeper dive into the culture of the city that I call home. Next, I covered the CAA which something that I felt most people were misinformed about due to social media. I continued this series with my article about democracy and I feel like this one was the one that became more relevant long after I wrote it.
Perfectly after this, I had the ‘What moves Arnav?” article which I feel was a culmination of everything I’d written to that point. Next, I collaborated with my good friend, Eesha to write the most important article I’ve ever been a part of. I spent more than a month researching and studying my material so that I could write an immaculate article and I’m still really really proud of what we did on the ‘Racism Through Pop Culture’ article set.
I’d been wanting to cover my favourite football club, Liverpool, for a while and that’s why I chose to write about the Hillsborough disaster, and it turned out to be one of the most hard-to-research articles I’ve ever written. The next two articles were small ones about topics that I was interested in. I’ll be completely honest, it isn’t my greatest work and I wasn’t exactly proud of the Green and Vatican City articles. My next highlight was when I collaborated with another friend, Pranav, to write an article covering the inherent problem with the US election system, which was a really interesting article to write because I had to make it extremely bipartisan. My penultimate article covered the problem with elections in the first place and how Biden’s win doesn’t feel earned.
Throughout my tenure as Current Affairs writer, I tried my best to maintain authorial integrity and made sure I didn’t state anything untrue. I was tired of seeing everyone learn their news from Instagram stories and other unreliable sources on Social Media which are usually biased towards one side or the other in their writing. I really hope you guys learnt even 10% of what I did by reading my articles. I hope you were more informed this year. I hope you started forming opinions of your own this year. 2020 has been a lot, but I hope I helped you get through it.
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