Withdrawal symptoms

Newspapers were an inseparable part of our growing up, and not just English papers, but those in local languages as well

The one line I remember from the otherwise manipulative 2018 biopic Sanju is the eponymous hero mentioning in his prison broadcast how a daily fix is home-delivered to a vast number of people without raising even a single eyebrow. He was talking about newspapers and he was spot on at least as far as this writer is concerned. 

My mornings begin at 6 am, with hot coffee and a stack of papers which our kind neighbourhood vendor has delivered almost an hour before. One of the occupational hazards of living in Gujarat is that this comforting routine is disrupted on about