Paper chase

My editor is always telling me that I don’t read the papers. He is, I must admit, right. I frankly don’t have the time in the mornings, my time spent in chasing the maid to see that she manages to reach every corner of the house with her arbitrary broom, closing doors and drawers behind my father, holding a dish of milk and following the kitten on her crazy skitter and, somewhere, somehow, in between, brushing my teeth, restoring some order to my recalcitrant hair, putting on my face and finding clothes that will stay respectably neat through the working day. Besides, even when I can put my feet up and concentrate a bit in the evenings after dinner, who wants to read about blood, gore and more angst?

But it is a battle, one that I am afraid I am not on the winning side of. For me, reading is pleasure, a habit that I was inculcated into long before I could even speak. Soon after My Big Picture ABC came everything from Enid Blyton to Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald to Edgar Wallace and far and beyond to places and characters I often saw just once, but sometimes kept to cherish and savour for as long as I could read.

But then I started working for a newspaper…and that kinda messed it all up, as my friend Karen would say. I read because I had to read, not because I wanted to read, and that made it surprisingly difficult to read. So I cursorily glanced at headlines, wandered through pages that had news that attracted me and then cruised on to the comics and the crossword, which were rather more fun than murders, coups and earthquakes. People dying did not appeal to me; giggling over the capers of Hagar and co, did.

It got worse as more newspapers clambered on to the Internet. Now I read once more, but prefer the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Washington Post, Midday and whatever else may grab the habit, to the Indian Express, Afternoon Dispatch and Courier and whatever else is on newsstands everywhere, as the saying goes. And at home, there is a pile waiting – DNA, the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Hindu…goodness knows what else we will take a fancy to because of good packaging, invitation pricing and the presence of bylines of people we know and love.

In all this, I don’t read any more. I plough through this enormous pile of newsprint every evening, having reduced it slightly in the morning if possible, and see the same stories everywhere, which decreases the charm quotient considerably. Why would I want to know more about a shootout in South Mumbai that I have already seen and heard on television? Will HT give me more insight into the happenings of that dramatic afternoon outside the art gallery than, say, TOI, or even DNA? Of course, the Hindu has its own special cachet, since it comes to us from Chennai one day later, which gives it all an incredibly funny sense of déjà vu!

Unfortunately, with the kind of madness I live within these days, I cannot read anything, really. Pre-kitten, I did the daily newspaper crossword and managed to get through a few pages at least of the crime novel I actually fought to acquire. Now that the little orange furball is bouncing all over the house and the people who live in it, crosswords are consigned to the old-paper pile before I even look at the page that houses one, unless of course, the baby cat has shredded it before then.

I have no complaints. My editor does. Perhaps he should come spend a day at our house!