Dus baje raat mein so jate hain khabrein sunkar/
Aankh khulti hai toh akhbar talab karte hain
I cannot remember how many times my wife has threatened to cut down on my daily dose of newspaper reading. Beginning the day with reading dailies is a ritual I am addicted to ever since I set foot on Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campus in the mid-1980s. In fact, it was the newspaper and periodicals’ section at AMU’s massive Maulana Azad Library, the jewel in the varsity’s crown, which enticed me to the heap of dailies.
I began with one, then two, three….multiple dailies. While I spent hours devouring mostly English dailies, skipping Chemistry classes and bunking Biology practicals, my attendance got shortened. Gradually I lost interest in science subjects and wrote to my father (through snail mail), telling him about change in my interest. I told him I wanted to change my stream from science to the Arts as I found Humanities more appealing. Physics was what I feared the most (Sorry Prof Wasi Haider Sir, do not get angry if you happen to read it. Anyway I enjoyed your lectures as you would speak in a little American accent and light your cigarette right in the middle of explaining gravity and other laws that I thought were of no use to me).
My father, through his long missives in Urdu written neatly in blue inland, tried to convince me about the benefits of securing a career in medicine. He tried to find out the reasons I had lost interest in Science subjects.
I wanted to read History, Political Science, Literature etc. Then he found that I had lost my heart to English newspapers and I spent most of my waking hours reading and reading newspapers, magazines and books, but not textbooks. He hated it since he knew a disciplined, serious and organised study of science subjects alone could have given ne a seat in the MBBS course. Those days, children, especially from rural India, did not have much choice to express what they wanted to be in life. Most boys and girls of my generation grew up fulfilling their parents’ dream, curbing their own desires.
Since my heart was not in Science and I couldn’t summon the courage to override my father’s decision and go and change my stream on my own, the results were disastrous. After a couple of years, I was uprooted from the then intellectually vibrant and academically stimulating AMU campus. My father replanted me in Patna on the bank of the mighty Ganga.
A few months there, and I was back to reading English newspapers voraciously. Since I couldn’t afford to subscribe to more than The Times of India, I would push the paddle on a bicycle from Kurji near Digha to the iconic Khuda Baksh Library near Patna College. Every afternoon its reading room opened with over a dozen newspapers inviting us to pore over them.
Why did I fall in love with English, especially English newspapers? In hindsight, I think human beings are programmed to break shackles. They want to shed the many inadequacies that chain them to the status quo. Since I grew up in the Hindi Heartland and studied in Hindi medium, my exposure to English was utterly limited. Once I was picked up from the Hindi arena where I was one of what journalist Shekhar Gupta calls HMTs (Hindi Medium Types), I wanted to break free. I wanted to speak like students from convents. I wanted to compete with products of St Michael’s and St. Stephen’s. Once I attended a meet at Mumbai Press Club where Shashi Tharoor was in conversations with Ayaz Memon. While asking a question, I joked that I had forgotten to take my dictionary when I attended the meeting. Tharoor laughed but also said he had not used difficult words in his talk that evening. What I also wanted to tell him but couldn’t was that, unlike him, we the boys from the backwaters of Bihar, did not have the privilege to attend the elite Campion school of Mumbai where perhaps even the peons spoke workable English. The disadvantage that rural India suffered and continues to suffer because of language barrier is too well known to be dwelt on here.
So, my love for English newspapers continued. It only grew and reached a point of no return, a point where I had to rebel against my father’s wish to see me taking the Civil Services exams.
“You didn’t study Science subjects because you said you wanted to study Arts and become an IAS officer. What happened to the dream that you sold to me?” asked my father. I could not say much because, due to guilt and confusion, I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. A timely intervention from a good psychiatrist saved me.
Holding my degree in History (Honours), I left Patna for Delhi, promising my father I would prepare for the Civil Services Exams. I never did that. Actually this plan of lying to my father was hatched at the clinic of the Patna doctor who had told me, “Do whatever you want to do, but do not break the heart of your father right now. Let him find it later.” It happened exactly the way the doctor had envisioned.
A few weeks in Delhi, an elder cousin whom my father had made my local guardian in (Zafar Bhai, I owe you a fabulous dinner at the Leela Hotel in Delhi in whose vicinity you housed me for several weeks) informed my father that I had joined a magazine in Nizamuddin and his dream of seeing me, suited-booted travelling in a shiny car with red beacon (those days District Magistrates’ cars did sport that status symbol which I hated because it appeared to me a legacy from the colonial occupation), had gone for a toss. My father once again wrote a long letter, again inland, pouring his heart out. I could feel his heart ached with a huge sense of loss. I could imagine how much tears my beloved father must have shed over the daylight dacoity of his dream by his own son. I could imagine how many sleepless nights he must have spent tossing and turning in bed, cursing Aligarh where I caught this “disease” of English mania.
A year later, I was on the Golden Temple Express to reach Mumbai the next day; lonely, hungry, thirsty without a proper place in a strange city.
But koshish karne walon ki kab haar hoti hai.
The love of the English newspapers did not leave me. Even when I struggled to buy the ubiquitous bada pav for lunch for months, I would shell out a few rupees to buy a copy of TOI. And it was an advertisement in TOI for a diploma course in journalism at K C College, Churchgate, that caught my eyes. I joined the course and doors to newspapers kept opening.
My love with the newspapers remains intact regardless of whether my wife wants to do cost cutting. She has been threatening to drop a few of them. I do not get time to read all the six dailies. But they look soothing to my eyes, invisible sources of pleasure as they are.
Hey, cut down my coffee dose if you really want to save, but do not cut down on the daily dose of buying dailies that I am addicted to for years.
It is my marijuana, my opium. It is also my companion, my tonic, the vitamin pills that keep me agile, awake, informed and entertained.
(Mohammed Wajihuddin is a senior journalist with The Times of India. This piece has been taken from his blog).
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