just like that

Starting with this post, Iam starting a new series – ‘My forgotten friends’. These posts will be about certain important companions (mostly my habits – not human beings) of mine whom I have slowly forgotten in the one-and-a-half years I have been in this place. I have been so busy with all the wonderful things that IIM Indore has kept me occupied with that I haven’t even realized that these guys are slowly slipping away. Anyways, now I would like to look back at them and see if any of them can still be rescued. So here we go!

I have lived the major portion of my life in Chennai. There are two things a Chennai guy will never argue about – The best film star and the best newspaper in the country. I have almost woken up everyday to find ‘THE HINDU’ on the sofa near my bed. I guess I started reading ‘Hindu’ when I was in sixth or seventh standard. Like all starters, I used to read only the sports section. That was also the period I got interested in cricket and I used to closely follow the fortunes of the Indian team through all the articles that came. I remember how automatically I used to take the paper, remove the supplement, go to the last page and flip back one page to reach the last but one page (Sports page). By the time I was in eleventh standard, Vijay Lokapally (the guy who wrote columns in the sports section) was one of my favorite writers. I liked Hindu also because it almost covered all the sports Indian players were taking part in, irrespective of where the event was happening. That’s how I kept track of how many titles Vishwanathan Anand was winning and how Geet Sethi was faring at the England Billiards championship. Some of the sports news that came in Hindu was carried by Doordarshan only in that day’s evening news and this impressed me even more.

When we were in ninth standard, a lot of boys in school always talked about sports. So it was a kind of show-off for most of us to talk about all the players, all the statistics and the gossips. And the fact that I didn’t have cable connection at home (meaning I didn’t have access to any sports channel) meant I had to read the sports section from top to bottom without leaving out even the slightest detail.

My grandfather was the one who had encouraged me to read Hindu from the beginning. He said whatever English knowledge he had was thanks to reading Hindu over the years. He was initially happy to let me just read the sports pages but slowly he was advocating me to read the other sections of the paper as well. When I was in eighth standard, he told me ‘you have to start reading the open page supplement’ that used to come on Tuesdays. In the second page, it had a section called ‘Know your English’ which was pretty interesting and I began to read that as well. Of course, my other favorites were the sports supplement and ‘Young world’ that came on Saturdays. I was deeply disappointed when Hindu discontinued this sports supplement sometime later.

As I moved into my eleventh and twelfth standard, my grandfather asked me to read the editorial and the ‘letters to the editor’ – he said that I will learn a lot from these things. I tried but found them boring and till my third year of engineering restricted myself to the first page for some headlines and of course the sports pages. Then midway through my third year, I joined IMS coaching centre for my CAT training. There was this guy, manager of the center, who talked so impressively and motivated all of us towards the test. As part of the preparation, he asked us to read the center page of the Hindu everyday. He said it will serve two purposes – one, improve your awareness about a lot of things and two, improve your language. He said whenever you find a word that you don’t understand, stop reading and immediately refer to the dictionary, understand the meaning, try to fit it back into the sentence and continue reading. So the Vimal who never read the editorial despite repeated pleas from his grandfather over the years finally began to read the center page because he wanted to clear CAT :)

It was during this period I began to realize what a brilliant paper ‘The Hindu’ was. The coverage was so complete; the editorials and opinions were so unbiased. In fact, one day I read another newspaper and felt so bad that I had to come back in the evening and read ‘The Hindu’ to console myself that everything was fine with this world. And this perfect love story continued until one fine day, I had to move to Mumbai to take up my job.

At first, I thought they were joking but when I learnt that people there really don’t read ‘The Hindu’, I was shocked. It was almost like waking up one fine morning to find your right hand missing. Even in my office, where even the ‘chotu mottu’ papers were bought everyday, I was stunned not to find Hindu amongst them. Pretty soon, I found that the only place I could get Hindu was in Mathunga (a predominantly Tamilian area in Mumbai) and I was living in Kandivali. On two Sundays of the month, we used to go to ‘Mathunga’ for two purposes – to have good tamil food and watch a tamil movie. The secret motive for me of course was also to buy ‘The Hindu’. You can’t believe the amount of joy I used to get when I read that paper later in the evening. Of course the disappointing fact was that there was no editorial on Sundays :)

The paper that was selling the most in Mumbai was the ‘Times of India’. One look at the newspaper and I wondered “people actually read this??” It never really seemed to have any issue that was important to the common man. All it was concerned was with any news that was sensational, any news about movie stars and cricket personalities (I remember recently there was a front page article about Sourav’s little daughter asking him ‘Papa, why are you not playing these days?’ after he was dropped). Basically it had anything which would make it sell. And I guess that’s what mattered at the end of the day. I resigned myself to reading the opinion pages of TOI. They weren’t exactly that bad after all but I couldn’t even begin to compare it with my paper. By the end of the year, I had started reading Hindu online and consoled myself.

The problem continued when I came here for pursuing my studies. Although Hindu was available in the city, it was a Delhi edition and came in pretty late. And since the campus is some 30 kms away from the city, the newspaper guy could get us ‘Hindu’ only one day late. Having been starved of it for over a year, I settled for even this. But after a few months, I found it really stupid as very often I would be reading news two days old and ultimately discontinued it. These days, I have a subscription to Business Standard. The paper just comes everyday in the afternoon and I hardly ever touch it.

Right now, the very thought of me sitting on the sofa with a 'Hindu' and sipping the hot coffee that my grandmother makes is enough motivation for me to get a job in Chennai :)

I shall close with the links for my favorite paper.

The Hindu online - http://hindu.com/
The ePaper - http://epaper.thehindu.com/

P.S. – I just realized how nostalgic this post had gotten. So if you are allergic to it, keep your distance from this series :)