Festival Theatre: Why Writing That Avoids Discomfort and Journalism That Seeks Comfort Slowly Forget Reality
✍️ Written by Saket Suman
Writing and journalism are always under pressure. Pressure is their natural habitat. The tragedy now is that comfort has begun to cunningly pass off as success. The cushioned chairs, the familiar faces and the reliable applause! A profession that cannot tolerate discomfort will eventually lose the ability to describe reality. And reality, unlike these sponsored festivals, does not curate itself.
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The music swells at the right moments when the masters of the ring want. The pauses are perfectly timed and even rebellion, as it turns out, has been well rehearsed.
But this is not how writing used to behave. Writing used to arrive uninvited. It knocked things over. It asked questions that made rooms uncomfortable and silences awkward. Now it prefers RSVPs. It likes a stage, a moderator and a time limit. It has learned the art of saying something sharp in a tone that reassures everyone it will not go any further.
Journalism, meanwhile, has acquired excellent table manners. It knows which questions are “important” and which are “interesting,” a distinction that often translates to which ones can be asked without spilling the wine. Responsibility is invoked frequently, usually to explain why something obvious does not need to be said out loud. After all, everyone in the room already knows. And knowing, apparently, is enough.
The parade is impressive in its inclusiveness. Many voices, many accents, many perspectives but often from the same families. Surnames are circulating like heirlooms. Access has been inherited, passed down gently, and described as continuity. Conflict of interest no longer hides in the shadows but it is now lounging in plain sight, confident that no one will point because everyone has already taken a seat nearby.
The humour lies in how seriously all this takes itself. There are earnest discussions on courage in rooms where courage would be terribly inconvenient. Panels on truth where truth has been advised to keep things “balanced.” Long conversations about holding power to account, carefully scheduled between lunch and evening cocktails, where power itself is often just a handshake away.
Writers speak passionately about resistance, usually in the past tense or in the abstract. Journalism praises dissent the way museums praise rebellion, something that is beautiful, historic, and safely contained behind glass. Everyone agrees that the world is in trouble. The only thing missing is the mild inconvenience of asking who might be responsible.
Young writers are noticing everything. They always do. They see how rebellion ages into respectability, how the sharpest critics eventually acquire soft landings. They learn which silences are strategic and which are career-limiting. They watch how often bravery is applauded when it belongs to someone else, preferably someone who cannot attend.
None of this feels dishonest in the moment. That is the magic trick. It feels mature and sensible. A little compromise here, a softened adjective there. Writing, after all, is about nuance. Journalism is about access. And access, once acquired, is very hard to risk for something as unstable as principle.
But writing has a memory. Journalism has a record. These things add up. The rooms blur, the panels end, and ultimately the photographs fade. What remains is alignment. Who spoke when it was easy. Who stayed silent when it was not. History will be remarkably indifferent to how pleasant the evening was.
What makes this moment almost endearing is its confidence that being large means being important. That attendance equals impact. That if enough people gather to talk about ideas, the ideas must be safe but ideas do not need protection. The powerful do. And power loves nothing more than being discussed politely.
The parade will go on. There will be more banners, more conversations, more perfectly phrased unease but the reality will continue refusing to follow the programme, produce facts that do not fit and questions that do not wait their turn.
The choice, as always, is not between belonging and exile. It is between writing that decorates the moment and writing that documents it, between journalism that keeps the room comfortable and journalism that makes it squirm and between marching along and stepping aside, just long enough to ask why everyone is walking in the same direction.
The uncomfortable truth is that writing has never been harmed by pressure. Instead, it has always been weakened by ease. And this parade, for all its noise, is now leaving very shallow footprints. What will endure are the marks left by those who did not wave back.
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