MAY BE with the arrival of dotcom Citizen Journalism, all is not lost. Now we poor readers, who have suffered at the hands of haughty editors, can write our own stuff and read it within a few hours on the Net. But then the joy of stretching your legs on a lounge chair, sipping a cup of tea and reading a paper, is still not there. When will I be able to read my own articles and those of other fellow CJs, without being hunched over my laptop or staring at the monitor? I like to fold my newspaper. Perhaps, Bill Gates is listening!

 

Millions all over the world are addicted to their morning newspaper, as much as they are to their morning tea. As we savour sipping the cup that cheers, our heads are buried ostrich-like in the folds of the newspaper. We do not relish either intrusion or distraction from anyone. In those moments, I suspect that each though reading the same newspaper is floating on a cloud, which is entirely his own. The same paper means so many different things to different people. A senior citizen, I know, turns to the obituary columns first. He meticulously goes through the endearing epitaphs, penned for those who have already left for the moon on a one-way ticket! He tells me, that when his professional contemporaries and friends give up their mortal coils, the outburst of sorrow and praise for them are not likely to appear on the first page. His obsession with the obituary column and with death surprises me, for it comes from a brave veteran aviator who survived a crash, when his plane plunged in the Bay of Bengal, and he swam to safety to the Burmese shore.

 

Then there are those who just cannot wait to turn to the sports pages. The rest of the newspaper has no meaning for them. For them the world is all about Shoaib Akhtar’s antics, ‘turning pitches’ or Sania Mirza doing a catwalk! There also seems to be a big misunderstanding. What normally appear on the ‘Sports’ pages, to my mind belong correctly to the ‘Business’ pages, as they are more about multi-crore TV rights, celebrity endorsements for pesticide-laced soft drinks’. As cricket is regarded as our national religion, the editors should give some serious thought, whether it should be covered under ‘Sports’ or ‘Religion’. In my school days, Hockey was our national game and cricket was the ‘king of games’ played by ‘gentlemen in white flannels’! The kabaddi played in our lanes or at the national level were not yet sponsored by mafia-backed ‘gutka kings’.

 

My father, a philosopher by profession, used to curse and could not understand why whole pages were wasted on ‘those damned figures’. Of course, he was referring to the stock market quotes, shunned by the otherworldly, but studied with a magnifying glass by those who follow every vagary of Dalal Street.

 

For those who revel in the Machiavellian world of politics, the newspapers have ceased to spring any cloak and dagger surprises in the morning. Blame it on TV! Before we go to bed, the umpteen competing news channels update us by the hour, about the swinging equations between Prakash Karat and our saintly Manmohan Singhji. Then every evening, numerous TV chat shows dissect every happening on this earth, in an endeavour to tell us the ‘real story behind the story’. Then what is there for me to look forward to, in the next morning’s paper? Nothing really, but going through the motions of reading the paper is an addiction I cannot do without. Even if I curse The Times of India for its trivialisation and uncalled for titillating content, I still stick to it. Like old wives, it is too late to change! For some mild flirtation, every morning I also look up on the Net the editorials of New York Times, Dawn of Karachi and Shekhar Gupta’s incisive articles in The Indian Express. It just gives that extra insight into differing viewpoints and makes me feel global, even if the ‘Old Lady of Bori Bunder’ would frown on these flirtations.

 

There is, of course, a sadistic streak in me, which makes me hunt out all news items and scoops on scams, about the way our city is being destroyed with some help from ‘reputed’ builders, politicians and the bureaucracy. This shoots up my blood pressure, which is not good for my health. I retaliate by writing letters to the editors, expressing my outrage about the destruction of the city. While some get published, most are consigned to the editor’s ‘Recycle Bin’. To my knowledge, there is as yet no ‘Obituary’ column for rejected letters and articles. My recourse is to look for Laxman’s cartoon of the day. His Common Man and I empathise with each other about the misery life is dishing out to us.

 

It is tragic that cartoons, which occupied the pride of place in a newspaper, are disappearing and our Laxman is ageing. A good cartoon with just a few deft strokes could be more incisive than a few hundred words of an editorial. Stoically, I laugh to myself and wonder why only misery makes us laugh. Has there been ever a cartoon about something good, which has happened, and has made us laugh? Dark humour about the dark happenings around us, is what makes us chuckle – what an irony of existence!