No substitute for newspaper

Kritika Kanwar

“There is no substitute for print,” said my father while struggling to download newspaper apps in his phone early in the morning.

As the tricity faced a lockdown, my ‘three-papers-a-day’ father was visibly crestfallen. For someone like him, who had never imagined a morning without being greeted with a newspaper, the message came as a bolt from the blue. Homebound, newspaper was the sole relief for him. After the initial struggle with digital apps, he found his way to all latest Covid updates!

My mother, on the other hand, handed over the reins of domestic chores to other working-from-home members of the family and spent most of her time enjoying old newspaper pullouts that she had collected for leisurely reading, but didn’t have the luxury to read — until now.

As far as a non-tech savvy person like me is concerned, a steaming cup of tea in the morning is no longer accompanied by unfolding the newspaper. When the curfew was extended by a few more days, newspaper nostalgia was bound to arise. Taking a quick scan of the front page and then directly jumping to the column of musings with each sip of tea used to be my daily morning ritual. The absence of that touch, smell and boundless imagination while reading newspaper in print seems to be a #majormissing now. The excitement of jumping out of bed to grab your untouched copy seems to have faded.

Some events, I believe, are materialised only when they appear in print. As I made the unusual move of reading paper online, I found myself distracted by a plethora of commercial advertisements offering me bags and apparels at discounted rates. Reading

paper digitally is an incessant struggle for people like me, who keep oscillating between the process of zooming-in and zooming-out on the screen.

“No access to newspapers in print has its own disastrous consequences. With no activity to keep people engaged, many of them have taken the ‘social and moral responsibility’ of circulating every single update to their ‘loved ones’ by bombarding their inbox with Covid ‘gyaan’, without even verifying the facts. During such times of misleading narratives and rumour-mongering, the power of print can’t be underestimated,” said Poonam Thakur, an Assistant Professor in a local college, who is also an avid reader.

Not someone who would consume news from social media, I have rather found respite in reading old newspaper copies and editorials to make the most of my homebound days. Though newspaper supply has been hit due to the unprecedented crisis and curfew, people like me are sure to miss the joy of relishing their morning tea with broadsheet in hands and experiencing the world open up to them.

Truly, some joys can’t be digitised.