Valiya S. Sajjad

-Fulfilling Profession in terms of its commitment to Truth.

Valiya S. Sajjad is the Chief Reporter at Kuwait’s leading English daily, Arab Times. Quickly rising through the ranks from a rewriter to chief reporter, Sajjad has proven himself in the field winning the respect of fellow journalists and his community at large.

Sajjad became a journalist quite by accident, albeit he had some academic exposure in the subject through his college program, Visual Communication, at Loyola College in Chennai. He was initially into copywriting, working in leading ad agencies like Lowe, O&M and Goldwire among others in Chennai, before coming to Kuwait.

Asked about his transition from a copywriter to journalist, Sajjad noted that his forte is writing and that both jobs require this skill in varying forms. “A copywriter mystifies and a journalist demystifies... either way you are engaged in communication.” He had always been an eager, indiscriminate reader, and was in close touch with different styles of writing. “When you shed the adjectives and write to inform rather than to impress, you are taking off your copywriting hat and donning the journalist hat.”

This way, Sajjad feels the transition of his professional avatar was easy and smooth. There are moments when he recalls with fondness the times when he was a copywriter, when too much of the crispy straightness of newspaper language (which has its own charm) gets to him. But he knows that it’s only a temporary drift and appreciates reporting to be a more fulfilling profession in terms of its commitment to truth.

Sajjad does not pretend that truth always presents itself as a black or white binary construct, and appreciates that several shades of grey cloud most issues. This, he deems, makes balanced reporting hard, “and is a slippery slope every reporter has to climb.”

How does he surmount this challenge? By trying to get as many angles on a story as possible and presenting them all in a coherent fashion, and in a manner that lets the reader decide for himself without spooning any prejudice.

The media in Kuwait is very free, the chief reporter notes. “It is the second freest country in the Middle East”.

Sajjadis married with two children, daughters, Hiba, 6, and Haya, 1. Hiba goes to the Indian Community School, Kheitan. He is very fond of his children and makes sure that he spends some playful time with them every day. That’s his daily dose of pickup.

He has a large extended family in Chennai. His late father was a successful hotelier. Two of his brothers have since diversified into clothes retailing. Among his other siblings are a doctor, engineer and two homemaker sisters. Sajjad has a high regard for his mother, and credits her for all his achievements in life, “… as would all my siblings.”

Wife, Jesna, is a homemaker, who does full justice to that title, “... because she is the battery that my home runs on.” Not just the usual housewifery stuff of cooking, tutoring children, shopping monthly rations and so forth, but Jesna also interfaces her home with relatives and friends in Kuwait and India with her endearing sociability. This is the quality Sajjad admires most in his wife for it offsets his own shortcomings in social skills. “I would be a very lonely man without her.”

Hobbies : reading and writing. Hobby writing differs from professional writing in that he writes fiction. Sometimes it is a novel (which is in progress in quirky bursts) or notes of his rambling thoughts on various subjects.

“I do this hobby writing out of a sense of insecurity. Pen is my stock in trade, and the thought of losing the skill scares me. My biggest nightmare is the idea of waking up one day to find that I have forgotten all the words in the English language. It would be like an investor losing a lifetime’s hard savings in one stroke. Therefore, I have to constantly sharpen this tool called writing and keep it polished and in good repair. If I don’t use it - like a key - it rusts.”

Sajjad’s favourite authors are

1.           Arundhati Roy,

2.           Vikram Seth,

3.           Michael Oondatje,

4.           Yen Martel,

5.           Amitav Gosh,

6.           Jhumpa Lahiri,

7.           Aravind Adiga,

8.           Salman Rushdie and

9.           Khushwant Singh (more for his journalism than novels).

“I like them all for their style and form (Arundhati Roy also for her intellectual honesty to call a spade a spade, no matter what the cost). I regard V.S. Naipaul very highly, and I don’t think anyone has quite broken traditions and invented a form that’s simple yet so rich.”

------------------------