Passionate About India

The Economist, in an unbelievably futuristic cover story titled Who killed the newspaper, way back in 2006, had written that the last American will throw the last piece of newspaper into the dustbin by the year 2050! I trusted The Economist and its Intelligence Unit’s researches far too much to outrightly reject its forecast, but surely had thought that that would be crazy, since I came from a family where I grew up seeing my father read about a dozen odd newspapers daily; and us reading the leftover pieces – because, after he had finished reading a newspaper, it would be full of holes due to his cutting out various articles. He had a wall-sized cupboard with hundreds of drawers with articles on every possible topic in the world... well-documented and stored alphabetically. So naturally, The Economist piece set me thinking about the ramifications for and of a world without newspapers, echoing the line of thinking of my father that after all, newspapers were where we got our knowledge,...