Also, there are mountains of homework. When I tell her that she can skip her homework occasionally, and get a B or C-plus in her term exams, and that it won’t bother me at all as long as she knows, say, Nuh is a small town, 20 km away from where she lives and not in Pakistan or Bangladesh.
‘But it is all so boring. Newspapers are full of useless information, and it is all politics. I have no interest in politics. I will never be a politician. They are all nepo-babies anyway.’
‘That is why I wish you would read newspapers, so that you get all the useless information in the world. That you get to know about things that you find boring today but might find interesting 10 years later. And I do think that you will make for a terrific politician, if you put your mind to it. God knows you are devious enough and a past master at moving the goalposts.’ She then proceeds to ask me, ‘Who is Nitish Shah?’
As a writer, it is of paramount interest to me that we get an infusion of new readers every five years or so in the print media. I fervently believe that readers who read newspapers and magazines in the hard-copy version will one day go on to read novels in the hardback. Because on your other e-devices, you only read what you search for. Once you search for ‘Willard’, the watch worn by Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, for instance, you will be fed articles on similar flamboyantly nicknamed dive watches from Seiko: Tuna, Arnie, Turtle, Monster.
The algorithm based on your internet searches has been set. So, on any given day, I get notifications on articles from around the world on Japanese and Swiss automatic watches, Duncan Fearnley cricket bats, Sam Peckinpah, Assia Wevill, Alden boots (worn by Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movies), and Old Forester (much favoured by Philip Marlowe). I am grateful to the algorithm that sends me these articles. But if I didn’t read a daily newspaper, I wouldn’t know that Ajit Pawar has changed sides once more in Mumbai and Vikram Lander has landed on luna firma. Both these events are of negligible interest to me. But I am glad I know them now. When you buy a print newspaper or magazine, you are provided with an array of articles on many things that you may not be interested in at present, but once you have read about it, it might ignite a slow flame of desire a few years later. Though daily newspapers have survived, the last 15 years has been disastrous for magazines. Till about 2010, there used to be a magazine and newspaper kiosk in almost every locality of south and central Delhi. At Connaught Place, two-day-old editions of International Herald Tribune and Le Monde could be found. Those days are gone.
Into the late 1980s-mid-1990s, there used to be a magazine called Parade. Priced at ₹10, it was a compendium of articles from British and American magazines, which, apart from being expensive, were not available in most Indian towns and cities. In Parade, for the first time, I read essays by maverick talents like Richard Price, Pete Hamill, Joan Didion and Hunter S Thompson. One picked up Parade and read everything in it, and developed an interest in things and ways of writing one was blind to till that time.
I can’t thank the same publishing house for publishing that other staple of my childhood, Stardust. I learned more about writing from those magazines than my five years of Eng Lit at Delhi University.
The writer is author of The Time of the Peacock
