Newspaper Reading

Multitude of people of older vintage would nod vigorously in agreement with me as to what a supreme pleasure it was to snatch a sheet of that day's newspaper from rampaging siblings and read gleefully. After the father finished with the paper and put it down, the entire household would descend on that bunch of printed sheets as if it was a treasure involved in a veritable battle of partition.  There would be a scrap among the children to get hold of the Sports page, specifically.  After the initial fighting, things would settle down to a state of relative calm, when the kids read their sheets and then started exchanging with the others, so that at the end of a half-hour period, all the sheets would have become things of the past, really history!  Still, no one dared to touch the paper till the father had slowly consumed all the news, along with his morning cuppa, at first.  Even when he was reading the English newspaper `The Hindu', the Thamizh paper `Dhinamani' would sit invitingly there untouched, waiting for its turn, just as we all waited for our turn. 

At that time none of us realised what was happening.  We were unconsciously cultivating the venerable habit of reading newspapers.  Which will grow in intensity with us and survive to aggressively compete with all the other news peddling media like radio at first and then TV, online channels and of course, born gossipers in our midst of whom there was and is never any dearth.  Our territory was part of the backwaters, where English Literature courses were taught partly in Thamizh (!!), entirely due to the students' inability to grasp the foreign language well, let me hasten to clarify, lest our Literature gurus curse me from afar.  A lot of us owe whatever initial proficiency we had developed in English language to the newspapers, magazines like Sport and Pastime and radio commentary on cricket, tennis matches and events, Radio news and the like. There have been times in our later lives, when we were either travelling for an extended period overseas or were on foreign assignments.  Apart from badly missing our kith and kin, two major things we longed for were home food and Indian newspapers.  To such an extent that we earnestly cultivated friendships with Air India personnel in our locations and asked them to retrieve for us, the newspapers given to the passengers on flights and avidly read news which was at a minmum 3 days old!!     

The story of how the newspapers reached our thresholds daily during our childhood days was also something very captivating.  The papers were printed at Madurai or arrived there by the first flight from Madras.  They were hurriedly bundled into waiting private taxis doing this `paper-trip' daily, even before too much sunlight seeped into the world.  The taxis covered the distance of about 150 kms to Thuthukudi in about 3 hours in champion ambassador cars, with top notch maintenance all round the year.  Because if there was ever a delay, Thuthukudi's entire paper-reading public would be up in arms, demanding someone's head for the lapse which prevented them from getting their daily staple in time! Even though there were other newspapers which were printed in nearby locations and delivered earlier, the demand was only for the abovementioned papers + The Indian Express, in most households.  The maharathi drivers of those Madurai-Thuthukudi paper-run taxis were real-life heroes for most of us in childhood for the daredevilry embedded in their driving throughout the year.

Now, cut-over to the present day.  While the newspaper reading habit is not exactly dying or moribund, it seems to have shrunk drastically overall. Many old timers have also chosen to discard the newspaper habit because it is a redunduncy in the age of mobile phones, which provide more up-to-date news.  Youngsters, of course, never even begin their association with newspapers, with exceptions of course, because the reading habit is not very appealing to them, outside of the screens they perpetually peer into.  So generally, it has become fashionable to look down into your mobile phone/tablet with crinkled eyes for news, rather than read a newspaper relaxedly, for the majority.  Children fighting to grab sheets of newspapers to read, as was the practice with us, is no longer a common sight nowadays, surely.  Probably also because most households have ceased buying newspapers daily - not required and a waste of money!

For those who are still sticking to the old-world habit of buying newspapers and reading them, the reasons could be very real or imaginary. Absolutely no doubt, there is a huge element of nostalgia in the whole experience.  They like the touch-and-feel type of experience everywhere, be it the newspapers or shopping.  This group is very unlikely to order on-line for items which require sensory perception to be experienced, like clothes.  The very unique smell of the fresh newspaper sheets, the joy of scanning the paper from top left to bottom right, covering all the columns, the pleasure of seeing the name of a village, town, enterprise or people one was associated with long back, included as part of a news item -- these are enough for the inveterate newspaper readers to pursue the habit for ever. You cannot substitute these small pleasures by watching TV or going online always.  Having said that, there are novel challenges to the enthusiasts now, to maintain their composure and love for the paper, despite what can only be seen as irritants and provocations.

Those into newspapers would not have missed the thin strip of extra paper sticking out on the side (how can they?), with some printed ad, raking a bit more money for the publisher.  For some reason, this innocuous intrusion causes distinct angst in avid readers.  They first want to tear that stip off, from top to bottom and bring the newspaper to the `normal' shape and size before starting perusal.  But stripping that piece off is not very easy because once you start, the tear veers off into the paper and a small portion of the actual news is also lost sometimes.  More irritation!! The damage being done, people can only look at the unevenly torn page and do some cluck-clucking, while cursing the publisher wholeheartedly.

A sizable number of newspaper lovers are probably in the over-50 quadrant.  That means most of them also sport spectacles, perched gingerly on their noses while peering at the paper.  When the fonts used by the publishers gradually reduce in size and sometimes necessitate a magnifying glass to decipher what is printed, it is distressing.  The least publishers can do is to ensure that news is readable by an average person, even with specs by sticking to a decent size font.  But, the smaller font, the more space they get for moolah thru ads, so that is that.  So, most old people keep their specs on and also have a magnifying glass handy to ensure that they do not miss anything -- that is what the they buy papers for, right?

Another stupid mistake publishers make is printing news items in colour (who is asking for this?), choosing the colours indiscriminately without any thought for the readers.  Try reading anything printed in green against red background, or dark blue against black and the like.  Publishers know the readers are probably on the older side, so why frustrate them with such a punishment? Do all the colourful gimmickry with the ads, which appeal to youngsters, but the reading material should be printed in conventional fonts and colours so that the older generation feels comfortable and satisfied.

The worst grouse we have is that while there are 10 pages of news, there are 50 pages of Akshaya Trithya ads + 20 pages of property ads + 50 more pages of assorted furniture, biriyani, restaurants ads. People like me are glad that there are pull-outs most of the time for ads and related material.  We can comfortably just ignore that.  But when ads are constantly mixed up with news on every page, that is a major intrusion which cannot be condoned easily. Avoidable, that is.  Reel in all the ad revenues you want, publisher, but keep the ads as separate pull outs or at least on separate pages.  Those who are interested are most welcome to read the ads only and throw the news, while we will be happy to do the reverse. We too deserve some attention; after all we pay for the newspapers; not getting them free!!

My dear wife is going through her leisurely read of to-day's newspaper and decreeing that there should be some authorised proportion of ads to news for everyone and all in the form of pull-outs. And there should be a serious Ombudsman to oversee compliance.  She is on our side!!

      

Lawyer's Documents

Caveate - This is not about all the practising lawyers in the filed today.  But most of the specimens we go to for day-to-day transactions are probably like this.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am sure most of us have had the misfortune of dealing with a lawyer for a sale deed or power of attorney or rental agreement and the like.  The ubiquous lawyer you come across for such purposes is someone who, at best, has a legal degree (hopefully) and has indeed passed legally (iffy).  They carry a double whammy for us -- pathetic language skills and an absolute inability to structure a straightforward sentence.  To begin with, their idea of a legal document is it should be smothered in legalese and should have bombastic language coming out of its pores.  As you can see, this is a deadly concoction and the result is a sale deed in which you invariably can decipher very little except identifying your name and address, if at all.  With our moderately better English, if we dare to suggest some changes in the structure or the language of the document, God help us.  The lawyer takes terrific umbrage and bristles for the rest of the transaction time with us.  And to be fair, it is not even his `own' document to begin with, but some shoddy cut-and-paste job, generously gifted for use by another lawyer-friend, who has similar or lesser credentials to boast of, if that is possible.

Typically such lawyers have one of two reactions when we attempt to infuse some decency to the laguage which is masquerading as English in their documents.  Either they bristle at our insolence in suggesting language changes to what they perceive as an outstanding piece of literary exposition or they shrug their shoulders with utmost indifference. They are wondering `why this idiot is paying me for doing the job and then wants to it himself'! The latter section of the tribe is easier to deal with.  We just write the document in better English and hope that the guy ensures that legally it is adequate, which is the bare minimum we can expect.  The former type is the real blistering problem.  Such guys have a preposterously inflated opinion of their document and, of course, themselves and would not even want us to tamper with a few `whereases' and `hereinbefore mentioneds' in that.  All we can do is some essential editing to satisfy our linguistic integrity and ask him to update the document.  The lawyer's pride and possessiveness about his master-piece will come glowing through when you discover in the next draft that three quarters of the changes we made are back in all glory, mocking at you and screaming out the lawyer's aggressive refusal to accept anyone as more proficient with English language.  

Most such lawyers think that the longer a sentence and more fully loaded it is with multiple synonyms and multi-syllable bombast (not that they recognize what they are), it is that much more convincing to the client.  Many sentences begin well, but are made to meander and stretch so interminably that one loses track of what the beginning was, when the end comes after some excruciating grind.  Once, I remember chopping down one sentence in a legal document to seven or eight individual sentences, which metamorphosis definitely helped in understanding the intent better.  More often than not, such gems of literary eloquence do not add any value to the document, except increasing its bulk.  And there lies the crux.  I realised, from personal experience, that such lawyers are very wary of letting us edit any of their crap out; because then the final outcome has only one quarter of the number of pages they began with, without losing any substance.  According to one somewhat honest lawyer  -- an oxymoron? --  many clients complain he has not done his job well if he skimps on verbiage, because their own legal perspective can only measure his work by volume and not by the quality of content.  To provide satisfaction to such clients, many lawyers insist on heaping up all the meaningless verbosity they can muster from assorted sources, including previously manufactured similar documents.  

Recently I had to do a real estate transaction and a broker was also involved.  This broker was familiar with my need/desire for crisp and precise documentation. He very earnestly told me that I dont have to worry about legal documentation because he has someone who is competent enough to do the job.  When the first draft arrived, I was appalled by the overall quality, since the language was terrible and many statements, long-winded and meaningless.  Redundancy was the hallmark of the entire piece and I shuddered at the shoddy nature of work.  When I rebuked the broker for such a document, he was shocked and blurted out that this was the best of the ten odd lawyers he had worked with in recent years.  After I briefly explained to him what the problems were, he realised his best was even beyond being the worst.  One vignette stood out and I showed the broker that the document, supposed to be a sale deed, had some seven pages of stuff which pertained entirely to a rental agreement, neatly tucked into the middle pages.  There were some twenty paras of how the buyer should conduct himself while living in the apartment and there was an indemnity clause to boot, for the seller's comfort, to cover breach of such rules of conduct by the buyer! Instead of being abashed at being an accomplice to such a document, the brazen broker sheepishly told me to help edit the whole thing completely, so that he can keep that as a master document for the future.  That was what I did free of cost for the broker.  The result, the document was downsized from twenty four pages to thirteen without compromising its legal sense, which responsibility I left to the lawyer.

As bankers, some of us have always wondered why Reserve Bank of India's circulars, containing directions to the banks as well as rules of banking, still rely so heavily on antiquated language from the colonial era. This not only makes reading of the circulars difficult, but requires some internal simplification and re-writing in the banks to enable lower level personnel to grasp the requirements well. In the process, there have been instances of silly errors creeping into the simplified instructions, causing grief to the banks later.  RBI and the lawyers are guilty of the same crime -- long-winded sentences which invariably have a good portion of redundant and/or heavy-duty verbiage.  The core difference is that while RBI's method is establishment-driven and probably requires an institutional shift whereas independent lawyers do not have the same problem, yet persist with antedeluvian mode of expression.

Over the years, I have wondered if younger lawyers coming into the profession would necessarily bring a wind of change and make the documentation easier to peruse and comprehend.  But unfortunately, that does not seem to have happened much.  Probably because of the copy-paste culture which is very prevalent in legal documentation. It will be interesting to find out how many young lawyers have drafted a proper legal document ab initio.  Your guess is as good as mine, but not many probably and not much of it, anyway.  Long live the serpentine sentences and bombastic expressions in legal documentation - posterity will also enjoy the fun!!  One young lawyer I recently met boasted of some fresh and modern methods of producing legal documentation, which impressed me....until I found out that the primary change he has adopted is in the matter of billing the client by the number of visits he made and the time he spent on the documentation!! Little else he had changed.  

The trigger for this piece is a sale deed I had to get done.  My dear wife did warn me I was going to end up drafting the whole thing and asking the lawyer to put some `law' into it.  That is what happened finally.  Why do you think she is omniscient??

    

      

Cacophony Of Quacks

Years back, during my school days, one hot summer evening I returned home all grimy and sweaty after a few hours of exhilarating outdoor games with friends.  Grandma promptly screwed up her nose and said `go and bathe'.  One of my sisters, without looking up from the book she was reading, very casually suggested that a dirty cat had brought a very dead rat home! Mother shook her head the usual way and looked askance with a wry smile.  True to form, I royally ignored every form insult and taunt, had my bath and made a glorious re-entry, all cleaned and spruced up, in a rather satisfied state of mind.  That was when my mother asked me `What are those dark blotches around both your ankles?  Could n't you scrub yourself properly'?  My sense of happiness ebbed immediately and I looked at my ankles - yes, there were two semi-dark patches, one on each ankle, etched in symmetry as if someone deliberately planted them there.  I did not, at that time, realise that what I was witnessing was the beginning of a family drama which was going to last a few weeks!! 

By then, an audience of sisters and other senior household ladies had gathered around as if they were being treated to a world-class spectacle, not to be misssed.  They were curious to see what I had got this time!  `Come here' said grandma, always the presiding deity, and carefully examined the damage suspiciously, without touching the spots.  She declared `Looks like some insect bite, which is spreading' and sought clarification from the patient if there was any pain.  I said no and she expertly decreed that coconut oil should be applied to the spots for the next week or more, in order to first arrest the spread and then get rid of the patches.  The tremendous interest the patches had generated earlier, dissipated quickly and everyone went back to what he/she was doing - nobody even attempting to fetch the coconut oil.  When I brought the oil, grandma directed me to apply it myself without anyone's assistance, because the patches might be infectious and we did not want the whole family getting infected and immersing in coconut oil soon. 

At that time, no one had an inkling that we were all part of a two-month extended episode, which would involve a whole lot of speculation, mirth, discussion, verbal volleys and weird recommendations, not restricted to our family.  As the patches became slowly darker and spread wider, as if some internal spider was relentlessly weaving a design under the skin; make it two spiders, because two ankles had to be covered, unless a spider could finish one ankle and travel all the way in the blood stream up and down.  The awful part was, coconut oil did not do the job and grandma had started on a complex paste with five ingredients, to be applied on the ankles three times a day - that meant the ankles stayed covered by home made bandage (pieces of old, torn dhotis transformed into this avtar).  But the old lady insisted there was no need to seek any medical help because she had seen and treated darker patches, which could react to allopathy medicines; she brooked no challenge on that count.  All this while there was no serious problem since I had no pain, not even a desire to scratch the affected part.  So, it was all fun and frolic for the family, with me playing the pliant and hapless protagonist. 

Very soon, the matter became top news in the vicinity and all the unofficial home remedy peddlers from the neighbourhood visited, hoping to look at the patches and prescribe their solutions.  Over the next month, everything available in the family grocery section and what the volunteers brought, free of charge from their homes, was used on me.  There was always a small crowd waiting for me to come back from school, all equipped with their wares, to get to work and insert something new into the bandage.  I recall ghee being used, turmeric, tulasi, cinnamon and garlic in the first installment. after a while, grandma could not resist the onslaught of multiple practitioners and gave up with indignation, with her customary declamation `Okay, do what you want, but all this is not going to work'.  Even then she characteristically refused to concede that she had no other remedy in store either! After that some ten to fifteen different things were used in permutations and combinations in an effort to defeat the enemy, but no one succeeded.

The blotches were very stubborn and cocked many snooks at all the quacks from the neighbourhood, flourishing all the time and slowly extending their territorial boundaries, much like Russia is belabouring to do with Ukraine now.  They did not seem infectious because no other region of my body got affected, but were obstinately refusing to budge.  Since a lot of the neighbourhoold ladies were involved, during their gossip sessions, the blotches around the ankle were a fixed point of agenda and updates were given as to whether any new quackery had been administered.  So much so that when I met on the road someone even remotely acquainted, the only question posed to me was about the `well-being' of the dark patches and the other party promptly went on to suggest yet another remedy!! 

After applying all kinds of things for almost ten weeks, suddenly the patches started waning and all the quacks in the entire neighbourhood were beaming with satisfaction as if their own remedy had worked to solve the problem.  Actually there was no telling what worked, because when fifteen different things were applied, nobody could pinpoint what addressed the issue.  That was the time I learnt that if you apply or eat multiple things to solve one problem you cannot stop anything until well after the issue is fully resolved, simply because you dont know what to stop!!  In truth, the actual remedy was an ointment our compounder had surreptitiously given me to apply daily, asking me not to inform my grandma because he was petrified of her. I followed his instructions fully and in complete secrecy to prevent the quacks from crying foul and prolonging the agony! Also to avoid incurring the wrath of the old lady for myself and the compounder. 

Why am I narrating this now, you ask?  Two weeks back, after a golf session, when I waded into some tall bushes to retrieve one of the many mishit balls, a felt some insect bite.  When I came home, lo and behold, there were two dark patches, small ones, near the ankles.  Now, there are no grandmas, mothers, sisters, neighbourhood ladies milling around and jostling to fix my problem. So I am my own quack now, using multiple creams and ointments to see how quickly I can get rid of the blemishes on my skin.  Still trying after 3 weeks!!  My dear wife says I never learn and she, as usual, is probably right.  The dark blotches on the ankles I carry now are proof of that.   

20th Century Breakfast Experience!

A friend was visiting Bangalore from Bombay.  A rather innocuous suggestion from my dear wife that he should grab a bite at one of the antedeluvian `hotels' (restaurants actually, but those days we did not consciously make that difference) was wholeheartedly endorsed all around.  When I asked him if he wanted to immerse in a vignette from the past, he was indeed very exuberant!  Of course, he would love to visit one of the old world restaurants which still doled out the classic idli, vadai, benne dosai, coffee routine to loads of craving people daily, with very little change in its menu or dishes from decades ago. That enthusiastic response meant a half-hour drive to Basavangudi, with a lot of expectations, for a peek into history with our stomachs. But what we did not factor in was that it was a Sunday and that a sizeable population of Bangalore would have converged on that particular 'hotel' to satiate its pangs for the traditional stuff.  I encouraged the friend not to panic on our approach (he wanted to beat a hasty retreat) saying it was almost 1030, way past normal breakfast time and we should be ok.  I was lamentably wrong -  and there was a hungry mob milling around, at the entrance of the restaurant, as if free food was being distributed from a soup kitchen during a natural disaster or war.

No exaggeration - some 150-200 people were standing in assorted lines and that many hungry souls could never be kept quiet until something substantial went into their mouths.  Most of the people did not even know which line led to what.  Important to note, because they did lead to different destinations as we realised after some 15 minutes of queueing up. One line was for take-away (`parcels' as the restaurant had indicateed on a carefully concealed board, which can be seen only from 6 inches away); another one was to get a token with a number, which then gained some momentum for you by placing you in the main queue, waiting for entry through the golden gate. Many people stood in the wrong line for quite a while before realising they were literally misplaced. I felt very diffident now, because I did not anticipate such a deluge of people for the ubiquitous idli, dosa and multiple queues to contend with. The ultimate prize was entry into the famous, nearly 100-year old eatery, where the menu remained constant throughout the day - yes, one got the same items whatever be the time. People congregated just to savour the food and atmosphere from way back because there is no other logical explanation when the same stuff is available in some hundred other joints, with good quality to boot. 

Fittingly, the gentleman guarding gate to the culinary heaven, keeping the ravenous mob in some semblance of control was a symbol of the bygone era.  Seemed to have bypassed a few decades and generations and descended on this scene.  A blue Gandhi-topee was perched on his top and he was dressed in loose-fitting trousers and shirt, with a generous splash of vermillion on his forehead!  He growled whenever he announced a token number for the holder to make a hasty entry; hasty because people were convinced somehow that even a small delay might cause them to miss their slice of history.  Frequently he was mixing up token numbers, thereby causing frustration and confusion among the already restless. He was moderately dictatorial in his own way, entrenched in his high stool with a modern walkie talkie in hand a-la a war chief, gently reprimanding people when wrong approaches were made.  Due to some malfunction in his mouth/tongue, phonetically he was able to make very little distinction betwen his J and K when he bellowed the token numbers. So when people with K14 enthusiastically responded and tried to jostle through, he was derisively castigating them, with the clarification that he was calling J14.  When we thought our turn was coming up, he took a toilet cum coffee break and extended our agony. In addition to the walkie talkie communication, he also resorted to hand signals and sheer vocal-cord power, to obtain prompt updates on vacancies available inside.

Like all Indian establishments, this also had its own ways of playing favourites.  When people known to the management or the chef or even a waiter wanted to enter, even without a token, they were surreptitiously ushered into the restaurant, giving them priority over others and were secreted in a back-room without access to the public.  And they justifiably gleamed very proudly at being able to bypass the commoners like us.  Why wont they??  These were ushered in,  ignoring token numbers and calling out names of the favourites, making it obvious that something devious and  inequitious was happening and a grave crime was being perpetrated on the waiting mob. And as elsewhere in India, some people were trying to dodge their way inside, using cheatsheets - like one guy said he had left something inside and pleaded to go in. But when we were sitting there after one hour, he was still eating!!  Again a very Indian trait - find a hole in the process and get the thrill of cheating the majority even if it is only for a regular breakfast.

Finally when our turn came and we entered triumphantly, without further ado we were reminded that rules prevailing still pertained to 1900s.  We were two and the table was for four. We were pretty strictly warned not to sit opposite to each other but side by side on one side of the table so that one more party of two can be accommodated opposite. Saring a table with strangers is the norm like in days of yore; if you dont like it, too bad, you can foot it to some other forgiving place.  The waiter who took our order was also half ancient and must have got the job on quota, as a descendant of an old staff member. Seemed dreamily distant and had to be reminded four times about our order.  A smile was not in his portfolio and a permanent frown adorned his face, a reminder of the fact that this place is a no-nonsense old world establishment where nobody had time for pleasanty.  I was almost expecting him to give us something available and ask us to take it or leave it.  And when he miscounted and ordered one dosa extra from the kitchen, he was trying to cajole one of us to eat that extra dosa also!!  I would have done it, if he was the friendly type, but not for a scowling one.  And the autocratic environment was reinforced when we got the items we asked for, in an order unilaterally decided by the establishment.  Apparently, the kitchen chose what to turn out in bulk and when, nobody else had a choice. So, we just gulped down our irritation and self respect along with the food.

Quality?  Was good, but nothing I would travel one hour for and stand in three lines to reach.  There are many restaurants in Bangalore which serve similar food with same or better quality.  So, I personally felt a bit tepid after this experience and may not revisit this any time soon in a hurry.  But the benne masala dosa we brought back for the others was a hit and vanished in no time.  Some consolation, I guess.  My dear wife made the final adjudicating comments - `surely you guys enjoyed the outing with this kind of food to go with'.  We did not have the heart to contradict her, with the gory details of our venture.  She has to be always right!!