The Smell of Fresh Print

It’s been nearly ten months since I landed in Columbus, Ohio. The last thing I remember doing back home in India is reading the Independence Day special edition of The Hindu, a mammoth edition with plenty for everyone to enjoy. There is something about waking up early, looking for the bundle outside your door, and sitting down with a steaming hot cup of tea that makes a morning complete. As a toddler, I’ve seen my father do it, with a tacit understanding that he would have to finish before my mother finished cooking breakfast and sat down with her coffee. The reason for the order of precedence was my mother’s uncanny ability to fold the newspaper in such a manner, that nothing could return it to its neatly folded pristine state again. And any serious reader of the news knows the pain of having to read a crumpled set of sheets.

The tradition has undergone a transition many times through the ravages of time. As India’s growth rate increased, the amount of time one could spend on luxuries like reading early in the morning proportionally decreased. Dad left early for work and read whatever he could salvage out of the office stack, my mother multitasked by cooking and reading out loud the latest crime statistics, and I barely had enough time to find all the paraphernalia to go with my school uniform and make it to the assembly at school in time. As I grew older, scrambling for the school bus was replaced by a passion for a morning jog, and a new age ‘ go slower’ thinking that made me spend almost two hours with the news every morning. A few years down the line many of my friends who had hardly ever read the business sections (me included), started reading them from half a dozen sources, with foreign newspapers like the Wall street journal assuming almost god like status. The reason for the spurt was the sudden interest in an MBA and the great rewards that always came with doing it from a ‘good’ place (read IIMs).

My favorite section has always been International Politics. Its amazing how something that I could do nothing about, and had absolutely no use for at the time, was the one thing I relished most. To me, it was the pickle that completes a south Indian meal. I have spent many a rainy evening re-reading the above section, reflecting on the unfortunate in Africa and the Middle East, the brave non-violent protesters of the Colour revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the busy New Yorkers in the USA. An integral part of this process is the ‘other person’. He or she likes reading most things you like and provides a sink for all the ‘reflections’ you come up with. My joy in the newspaper would have died long ago had it not been for my dad who patiently listened to my rants about the articles on eve teasing, my mom who gave a broad smile every time I found a scholarship announcement in the midst of the advertisements and some friends who nurtured my love for discussion throughout four years of undergraduate engineering. One of them was actually so good at the ‘read-think-talk-listen’, that after she left, I stopped reading the newspaper for a while. It hurt so much to not have her around.

So for someone who liked the newspaper so much, and had many fond memories associated with it, a year in Columbus was hell(only in this respect). The local newspaper was affordable, but had volumes of advertising, and boring news columns (from an international perspective). So at the end of a year, I decided it was time to do something about the situation, and thanks to a research assistantship that made many things much more affordable, I subscribed to the New York Times. After a wait over the weekend that seemed never ending, I finally found the bundle outside my door one morning. To read that headline from sheets in my hand instead of on an LCD screen after so long was plain refreshing. Enough to make me start waking up at six every morning just to read the news! Talk about unexpected benefits…