About Reading Newspaper

We recently switched from The Asian Age to The Pioneer and suddenly I recalled why I stopped getting The Pioneer in the first place many years ago. It is always blowing BJP’s horn. The Asian Age is far better but it is too biased against anything “Hindu”. In fact The Asian Age guys are cunning: their own journalists write trash, but their syndicated columns, for instance by Robert Friedman, are of high quality.

Since I don’t want to get back to The Asian Age we might start getting The Times of India. In the Indian blogsphere this newspaper is better known as “The Slimes of India” but it is actually not that bad a newspaper, considering the kind of journalism I’ve read or viewed. Actually I take the views of most Indian bloggers with a pinch of salt because they’re mostly “follow the herd” types so if one “reputed” blogger says he or she doesn’t like a particular newspaper, the feeling quickly becomes fashionable. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. Given a choice between trashy stupidity and intellectual stupidity I’d prefer trashy stupidity.

And anyway, there are some columnists in the TOI that I like, for instance Dilip Padgaonkar (he used to be the editor, not sure about now), Gurcharan Das and even Swaminathan A Aiyar of the Swaminomics fame. But the thing is, in the past, since I was the only one who decided what newspaper we should get because I was the only one who most of the times read newspaper in the morning (my mom got a Hindi newspaper for herself, my sister was never a newspaper reading types and my father worked abroad). Now, since I’m married, I cannot change the newspaper just because I want to. And the TOI is not liked in my household not because of the blogsphere, but because of the ideology and culture it promotes. My view is, these days every newspaper has the page 3 type sections; even The Asian Age has it.