A few years ago, while at one of the smaller airports in south India, I was in conversation with a colleague in the office on some of the “musts” that had to appear that day in the ‘LTTE’. There was a tap on the shoulder and a sharp question: “What LTTE?” It took the security personnel a while to be convinced that the abbreviation was not for the proscribed organisation and that we were chatting about the forum for patra — the Letters to the Editor column. The “musts” were an envoy’s letter and a rejoinder to an Editorial page article.
Every day, the editorial and opinion pages desk faces not simple questions about letters, but a barrage of queries and comments about how we manage this space. The tough ones that we handle, over phone and by e-mail, are from those letter-writers who are determined in their quest to be featured first and foremost in print. Even the assurance that their full-length letter will appear in the online edition is spurned instantly. The common questions they ask are: Why haven’t you published my letter? I have written so many letters but you ignore them! I came in the hot sun to the office and addressed it to you, but you ignored it; what happiness do you derive out of this? I sent an email, a postcard and a letter by speed post, so please publish the letter. Why are all the letter-writers only from Kerala? Why are you now focusing only on writers from north India? I know it; the moment you hear my voice you decide not to print my letter.
And there are also those that are unprintable and unreasonably question the editorial line, with threats to play it out on social media. One writer decided to share with us his “intellectual property”. He claimed that a German institution had evinced interest in his paper. When it didn’t quite cut the mustard, he demanded that we return the letter to him at once along with a signed declaration that we had rescinded our rights over the “IP”, or else face legal action. There was also a writer from Pakistan who hoped that by publishing in India a letter about festering civic issues in Lahore, there would be results.
Over the years we have fine-tuned our responses to be professional and polite. But despite our keen efforts to be just a voice on the phone, some readers have managed to breach this line and find out more about us. One frequent caller even figured out our weekly off days and demanded to know why two of us had exchanged our day off one week!
The letters section covers an area of anything between 600 and 1,200 words. Hawk-eyed readers audit this too. But much more is invested in this space; the ‘LTTE’ helps deepen the newspaper’s bond with its valued readers. Among them is a 90-year-old gentleman who telephones us from every destination he travels to. His narration of the day’s events ends with a simple request: “Please publish my letter”.
Another anecdote: Once, a first-generation reader from a village in north India wanted his letter published in print. We could only tell him to take a chance and look out for it the next morning. The grateful young man called the next evening: his stock had gone up in his place. And the paper, he said, had got a few more subscribers.
