NEWSLETTER

After all these years of being in and out of newsrooms, I see two things quite clearly on both sides of the editorial desk. 

One is that when it comes to the business of news, neither are news corporations pious purveyors of absolute truths nor should the job of keeping a journal be called an ism. 

And two, the understanding and telling of truths takes time. Something 24×7 news cycles—both mainstream and social—don’t have. 

What news consumers consume are headlines and sound bites. Daily news serves nothing more. It’s all just a never ending series of big breaking stories about new wars, bombs and acts of political violence. And even then, the stories are woven along predetermined partisan lines catered to fit ever  shrinking attention spans. 

Then again, being a reporter has let me travel to places far beyond tourist maps and travel advisories and into conflict zones I’d never have managed to reach if not for a piece of plastic that had a photo of me and PRESS printed on it in large letters. 

I’ve walked into the lives and minds of people very different from myself and seen glimpses of things hardly different from me. People connected to some recognizable and violent newsworthy event in the recent past. Some are victims, others are perpetrators, but most are people between these extremes. And their stories had no place in the reports  I was writing. 

That’s why this book. 

To tell the story of what I heard after the news crews left. To share what I saw when I looked beyond the burqa and the beard, beyond the olive-green of one fighter and the camo fatigue of the other, and to talk to the humans who wear these facades. 

What this book does is put together my reported notes that didn’t make it to the final edits of the articles I wrote. 

Spanning five years—2016 to 2023—the events and interactions in this book are spread out across Germany, India and Bangladesh. Though I did go to other countries  in search of violent men, spent time in their company and  recorded their stories, I have little to tell from them beyond  what I’ve reported. 

About the name of this book, The Company of Violent Men wasn’t the first choice. For the longest time in my head, it was  called ‘The Rejects’—meaning that which was rejected from my  stories at the edit table. But by the time I finished the draft,  I realized I was giving in to vanity by calling them my stories. 

Sure, I tell the stories from my point of view, and there are snippets of my life in them. But the lives and actions of  these men and women I talk about would’ve taken the same  trajectory even if I hadn’t reported about them. My own story, however, is now indelibly coloured by theirs. 

In this book, you’ll meet some militants and refugees, clandestine agents and insurgents, reporters and wheeler dealers—some extraordinary and some very ordinary  individuals caught in circumstances that news headlines,  including those of my own stories, have flattened into  convenient tropes of good and evil and us and them. 

Among other things, this book is an attempt to un-trope them. Bring them back to life as real, living, breathing humans.  Engaged as they are in the making, containing or narrating  of large-scale, world-changing and violent activities, they are  humans nevertheless. 

These violent men and women I speak of, some of them fight for faith, others fight for power. Many fight just to belong. But peel away the burqa or the badge, scratch the  skin of a military officer or a mercenary, and the fears and  failings that lie beneath are not so foreign from yours or mine. 

This book hasn’t been written to either exonerate the perpetrators or gloss over the injustices done to the victims  by giving their characters larger canvases—but to highlight  the basic human fragility we share with them. 

A word of caution to the reader: These are unfiltered dispatches. Unlike my news reports, I’ve held nothing back  except for the names of men whose lives may be endangered  by the writing of this book and women who are victims of  sexual assault. 

Not everything is pretty or polite. 

Moreover, if you have chosen an ideological side for yourself in any one of the conflicts I’ve referenced, you might  not find me saying things you’d want to hear. These dispatches  simply share what I witnessed first-hand through my imperfect  eyes. Eyes seeking not so much to judge but to understand. 

I offer nothing but my version of the stories. I offer no guarantees that my version will agree with yours and will take no umbrage at others giving their versions. But  I do hope these stories make you see beyond the extremes  that news wants you to see. The way I saw these people  when breaking bread with them, sharing a cigarette or simply walking alongside without the constraints of the  interviewer–interviewee protocol. 

In short, this is my attempt to put on record the sense of lives lived under extremes—to see past stereotypes for better  or worse. We are all, I still daresay, fellow voyagers on the  same turbulent waters, just trying to stay afloat. That is the  simple truth this book tries to share. 

So, to end where I started, I say: Yes, I was lost in the reeds of Bangladesh in 2016 and 2017. And I have continued,  very often and very willingly, being lost in the reeds of other  places. In this book, I collect some of those rejected reeds,  weave a basket out of them and put in some untold stories  I’ve been meaning to tell for a while. 

Excerpted with permission from The Company of Violent Men: Stories from the Bloody Fault lines of the Subcontinent by Siddharthya Roy (Penguin Random House India, 2024)