Saturday, Sep 13, 2003
Saturday, Sep 13, 2003 |
| The Hindu & me | ||||
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The Hindu & me
By Mukul Kesavan
Growing up in Delhi in the 1960s, The Hindu meant nothing to me. My parents read The Statesman, my aunt took the Times of India and thousands of people we didn't know read The Hindustan Times but my father had been raised in Mylapore in Chennai and so The Hindu sometimes turned up in conversation when friends of his with names such as Venkatraman and Desikachar visited. It was always pronounced Hin-doo with a hard `d' and a double `o' in the way some unreconstructed colonial might say it. If I thought of The Hindu at all, it figured in my mind as a provincial paper, or at best a peninsular one. I knew that this wasn't how `Madrasis' saw it: my father's friends spoke of it reverently, not just as a source of news or as a paper of record, but also as a model of English usage. This made no impression on me because The Hindu wasn't sold in Delhi. I first came across an issue of The Hindu as an undergraduate at the home of another one of my father's friends who happened to be The Hindu's economic correspondent in Delhi. He was a grave, reflective man and the paper had the same feel to it. I wasn't tempted to read another issue: when you're eighteen, grave and reflective seem a lot like dull and long-winded. I was nearly forty before I read it again and fell in love. Marooned for three months in a tiny university in England, starved of news from India, I discovered The Hindu online. Used to the Times of India in its present avatar, I couldn't believe that I was reading a paper which used correspondents' copy more often than it did agency reports, which thought books were a normal part of a newspaper's menu, which followed stories over a period of time (its chess reportage was an outstanding example of its adult attention span) and which, despite its masthead and its Brahmin by-lines, opposed Hindutva and its sponsors with grave courtesy. On returning I bought a subscription to The Hindu's Delhi edition and learnt to love its curious font, its pixillated photographs and the roundabout prose of its sports pages. Now, seven years into this affair, I find The Hindu indispensable because it takes India seriously. No other paper does, not consistently. Under the broadsheet exteriors of its rivals, beat tabloid hearts and they will always be better at producing filmi tattle and catwalk pictures. The Hindu doesn't need photos of pageants and starlets to reach the young readership crucial to the contemporary broadsheet's bottom line. It needs a cruel copy editor with instructions to frogmarch correspondents and columnists to the point inches before they usually do. (The writer is a Delhi-based historian.)
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