Adrian Batten is an English writer, editor and publisher who has lived and worked in Asia for the past 30 years. Most of us know him through his titillating and bitingly witty column to which he turns the full force of his journalistic arsenal twice monthly in the Bali Advertiser.
Adrian has worked for an impressive number of prestigious international publishers, big media players as well as humble literary rags including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Harpers & Queen, Hearst Magazines, The Times and Sunday Times of London, Straits Times, South China Morning Post and Newsweek just to name a few. The writer currently lives in Bali with his French wife, an accomplished photographer and designer. Currently he advises various Indonesian clients on marketing & promotion and is working on a potentially explosive book on the pharmaceutical industry.
What is its title?
Dunno yet.
Have you always been a writer?
Sort of, but I got up to all kinds of things. I worked with the RNLI on the lifeboats. Another early job was working as a roughneck on an offshore oil rig in Africa after the Biafran War in the early 1970s. I was an adman at the time in London. My accounts were Martel cognac and Britain’s largest brewer, Bass Charrington. Bit too good actually, all that good liquor, good food, weekends jetting off to the Martel chateau in Bordeaux. After a while I couldn’t hack the high life. Hit 200 lbs and blew up like a balloon. Then I met this Ozzie bloke in a Knightsbridge pub who worked on oil rigs off West Africa. Two days later I was on a rig off Nigeria. Six months later I was the fittest I’ve ever been.
How did you start your writing career?
I began - don’t laugh - as assistant editor of Burke’s Peerage. Quite seemly I was in them days. Then I got a job as a features editor with IPC Magazines in Fleet Street. Being young and in London in the 60’s was like heaven on earth until the dreary 70’s came along and ruined it for us all. That’s when I decided to take off for Asia.
Where did you end up?
Hong Kong via 2 years in Bangkok. I worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review for a few years in the mid-1970’s before setting up my own media company which I ran for 18 years until 1998. To begin with, running my own outfit was exciting, but like any business it was also a lot of hard work, too many meetings, too much travel, etc.
What kind of writing do you like to do best?
My areas of interest are cross cultural travel, health and transpersonal psychology. I was never a good reporter. I was much more interested in finding out why things are the way they are. I’ve always been a bit subversive, ever since I can remember. Hence my pseudonym, honoring the iconoclasm of Paracelsus. Must’ve been me mother’s milk. Cant and humbug just get me going, ‘specially when it’s the Great & the Good, who should know better. I like to level the playing field and I don’t like seeing people conned. I read law at the Inns of Court and sometimes think practicing law would’ve been a good way to tilt at windmills, but being a columnist suits me much better.
How did you get you ever get so worked up over the pharmaceutical industry?
Me, worked up? I guess in my mid-40s when I had to clean up my own act. My wife had a chronic health problem which I began to research. What I found shocked me. It shouldn’t have of course, medicine is a business like anything else. Though we all need to be educated consumers, we really can’t be bothered. We’d much rather leave it all up to the docs. Funny that, no CEO would give over control of his company to a management consultant yet we happily do it with our health, often our lives....
Could you expand on that a bit?
Well, there’s a concerted effort on the part of Big Pharma and medical bureaucrats to control the sale of natural supplements. They want to schedule them like drugs or reduce the dosage to non-therapeutic levels. They say supplements can harm us. That’s really funny when you consider how many people are killed by prescribed drugs. No, the truth is they don’t want the competition.
What’s going on in the whole field of medicine today is both terrifying and wonderful. It affects us all one way or another and yet most people don’t give it much thought. In terms of return on investment, the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable there is. These guys are routinely found to be acting criminally but no effective action is ever taken.
Where is it all going to lead?
Why, Death of course!
But hopefully postponed by 10 or 15 years extra active life, mobility, marbles and libido intact. No, but seriously, one of the things I dimly grasped somewhere in middle age was the concept of individuation and that allowed me to take a lot of new directions in my life, professionally and personally. Very simply put, the way I see it, life is a Mystery and by definition unknowable. Believing you know how it works is supremely foolish, if not dangerous. People who think that are forever killing each other. Our job is to open ourselves and align with the Mystery in so far as we are capable. That is a path and there’s always more, so there’s no excuse to get bored with life.
Readers may contact Adrian via : ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com
For anyone interested in being interviewed for Siapa, please
send CV to : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2004 Al Hickey
You can read all past articles of Siapa
at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz
