When suddenly one morning the papers didn’t arrive, I put it down to the local holiday, the no-edition announcement of which I must have missed in the previous day’s papers. But I checked and found out that was not the case. So it must be the delivery boy problem, I reasoned, and got down to scanning the headlines from various papers’ websites.
That ruined the morning. It is one thing to sit back and slowly relish unfolding and folding a range of papers in retirement idyll, aided by many cups of tea. It is quite another to have to hunch before a computer screen right early in the morning when I have – with difficulty – reconciled myself to the necessity of having to do so for several hours a day, as late in the day as possible. The computer remains an outsider in my sense of home, something you have to live with, whether you like it or not, like at one time having to go to office every day.
But when the papers didn’t come the next day too, I knew the matter was serious, and got down to planning the strategy for corrective action. As soon as it was past seven and I knew the corner store would be up and running, I set out in search of my Holy Grail, a place that could supply me the entire range of papers in which the pink ones were a must.
The first disappointment was the store across the main road, which I knew kept many of the papers but which, I now found, had refurbished and repositioned itself a little upmarket and decided to do away with the papers! On seeing my disappointment, the storekeeper suggested helpfully that I should try the bigger store beyond the crossing. Not only the man there didn’t have more than the top selling paper in two languages, he even told me quite curtly that I would have to go 2 km away to Thipasandra – a more modest, crowded, value-for-money market area – with the look reserved for those who ask for cheap stuff in wrong places.
To cut the story of a long search short, I eventually got all my papers after trying at a number of book-cum-publication shops. The nicest experience was being told by a young man in glasses, in response to my reeling off the entire list of newspapers: who reads that sort of stuff in these parts — the same way a bazaar stallholder would respond to a query for some esoteric fruit.
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I have had a similar experience but on an inverted social scale deep in the heart of South Delhi, where I went round three markets in an auto before locating a local distributer’s dump on the verandah of a modest market behind the more well-known and prosperous Shanti Niketan market. The most endearing was a middle-aged gentleman, also in glasses, in one of the Vasant Vihar markets, who flatly said, “People don’t read papers any more.” His shop stocked a collection of costly toys, games, bestselling English-language pulp fiction and the costlier magazines.
The journey in search of newspapers revealed that magazines that easily cost '20 or more were in; daily newspapers, except a couple of market leaders, were out. This put newspapers, an endangered species, in a unique category. In the age of open and free markets, shops – big and small – will stock any number of brands of soaps, toothpastes and biscuits. So a lesser brand among these will have some chance to not only reach out to loyalists but also occasionally cash in on impulse buying.
But a lesser newspaper doesn’t have a chance; it is shut out. A supporter of the underdog will have to depend on the hawker, who may sometimes tell you that you have to buy the paper for the full month so he could place a back-to-back order. Those papers don’t take “returns” or “unsolds”, and once when I tried to change papers midstream, I was sharply told off: what will I do with this (as if it was some kind of freak) paper for the rest of the month?
One city where old-fashioned news stalls still survive, offering a range of papers and magazines – both mass and niche – from morning till night, is Kolkata. I have to find out on my next visit what has happened to Ganashakti, the CPI(M) mouthpiece, which used to be pasted on long boards at street sides for people to read free. I found the same thing in a distinctly impoverished backstreet in Beijing. Next to it stood two old men who the new prosperity had passed by, engaged in a morose desultory conversation, as oblivious to the world around them as it was to them.
I know the day of the printed word is over, be it the newspaper or the book. Websites, e-readers, tablets will eventually take over. But what I find almost unbearable is the way many, like those on our ground floor – Toyota fans who divide their patronage between a Corolla and an Innova – treat their daily newspaper.
Like many others, they order that one English daily and on bad days, when it rains or the newspaper boy has thrown the substantial paper somewhat casually, it lies either sodden or dismembered and strewn in parts all over the driveway. I have never heard them telling off the delivery boy for his carelessness. It is painful to see semi-clad starlets in disintegrating newsprint bite the dust. Surely the institution of the printed newspaper, which carried mankind’s progress on its shoulder for three centuries, deserves a decent burial.