During my recent visit to India, I happened to browse through the pages of the Hindu and suddenly I noticed how much the newspaper has changed in the last 20 years. Glossy colorful pages have replaced the black and white print and a new wave of journalists have taken over the pen - the Hindu had definitely changed. I couldn't help but get nostalgic just perusing over the edition.
My schooldays always started the same way - eyes scanning The Hindu, hot cup of filter coffee in one hand, and the other hand alternating between holding a bowl (davara) to cool down the coffee and turning the pages of the paper. I always started in the second last page - the sports section - which had a good share of R Mohan's late cuts from the cricket pitch and Nirmal Shekhar's verbal volleys from the tennis court and if it had news of a Lara/Sachin century or a Boris Becker triumph at Wimbledon, that was about the best way to start my day. It was then time to read the international news and especially during my younger days the active quizzer in me used to learn capitals of countries by looking at the city of origination of the news article. A quick glance at the city news on page 3 and the national headlines, and that was about what I could digest at that age. I slowly graduated to reading the middle pages (business, letters to the editor and the columns), but the routine has more or less remained the same over the years except that the paper has been replaced by my laptop - Cricinfo, Rediff and WSJ with a hot mug of tea on my left hand and the mousepad on my right.
Though the Hindu has grown in technology and quality of print, their quality of journalists has definitely diminished. With the exit of R Mohan, the quality of the Hindu's cricket coverage had plummeted to new depths. The likes of Vijay Lokapally and G Viswanath (not the cricketer) are a great insult to The Hindu‘s great cricketing history. S Dinakar and Sanjay Rajan are passable but Ram Mahesh has come as a breath of fresh air and seems poised to restore its glorious cricketing heritage.
Many fond memories - scanning S Krishnan’s ‘Between you and me’ column for the “Parthasarathy” joke every Tuesday, fighting with dad for the paper during the precious morning hours before school, religiously clipping the Know Your English column every week for future reference, appreciating the paper's effort to penetrate the young reader's mind with the ‘Young World’ supplement and appreciating the simplicity and humor in V. Gangadhar's ‘Slice of Life’ will be cherished for a dozen lifetimes. Nowadays, I eagerly look forward to Ramachandra Guha’s Past and Present, Sevanti Ninan’s Media Matters and Shashi Tharoor’s eponymous column, despite his tendency to make a reference to his books in every fourth line. The regulars who review movies – Chitra Mahesh, Malathi Rangarajan, Sudhish Kamath et al – need to be taught that lines like “Santhosh Sivan has done good camera work” does not constitute a review. Gautaman Bhaskaran is their Roger Ebert, if you can discount a propensity to make movies seem more ponderous than they actually are. And lastly, what’s a piece on The Hindu without a mention of its legendary crossword. Being a cruciverbalist myself, it took me a while to develop the patience (read skill) to finish a full crossword, but it was always fun cracking the cryptic clues.
Today, in an industry where smut sells and sensationalism is the norm, The Hindu is still standing rock-solid on its foundation of journalistic integrity. It has fallen a bit from the lofty perch it held earlier. Their political reporting is probably a little biased and the quality of the sports coverage has fallen from its glory days in the early 90s. But the fact remains that they prioritize news the way it should be (Their front page won’t be filled with all the gory details of the Big B’s abdominal problem like Times of India), write with a strong social conscience, haven’t sold out to the glamor mafia, and, in my experience, offer the best writing available in Indian newspapers today.
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