Of Newspapers and New Mornings. 

Every morning in the cold season, as I stumble out of bed and into living, I focus on getting my limbs in readiness for the day. With a tall mug filled with a hot beverage, I ease myself into a comfortable sofa  and in the light of a lit  table lamp surf through newspapers. Invariably there is little to read. The world is falling apart; we've destroyed as  many institutions as could be destroyed and  damaged as much of the environment as we could, although grand national plans continue to march on relentlessly.  Meanwhile everyone in power is turning upon  anyone  out of  power, while much muscle flexing and badgering continues  between  those who occupy high offices, as part of the bid to worry people who stand  up against  them. 

So I quickly shift from dismal  news to stuff that is more diffuse, because  my brain cells  demand to be  fed some stimulation that will  keep Alzheimers and dementia at bay, before I succumb to  the coup that macular degeneration  will achieve in due course. My solution to postpone  ageing and to contribute to a better world is now focused on solving word and number puzzles. 

I spent a considerable part of the previous year sucked in by wordle and its multiplying kin, quordle and phrazle and so on, deeply enmeshed in a combination of propelled speed and power. until one morning, while I lay in bed a little longer, it struck me that this addiction to various cults in the wordle family had given me a grasp on floating alphabets and all I did was to place one letter next to another until my moment of revelation arrived. I got the correct combination and the page revealed a green light, almost florescent, that told me I had  conquered, in other words, mastered the word of the day. I felt powerful for a long time, and turbo-charged as well. I usually got wordle most days, at least by the third try, so as an indicator it suggested that my gray cells were ageing well. My success  with Quordle was about 75 percent. I got three of the four words right, but my moment of octane filled pleasure came from phrazle because I got the entire phrase rather quickly on most days. So the adrenalin flowed on and on for  months on end.

To go back to the morning of the reckoning, I  had written very little of note and lacked  motivation to write altogether. Worse, once I ran through the quordle clan, I tackled the spellathon next and followed it up with three sets of  sudoko, I felt  my brain cells had been given a workout  that left them in a great state of health and that therefore I might as well as  idle the rest of the day away.  So that fateful morning I looked  carefully at the five letter wordle in front of me: It was probable "strip,"  and in the meanwhile the phrazle for the day announced  "Break a Leg." I puzzled over both,  wondering at the subliminal messages. Normally, my brain would race over the multiple meanings encrusted around the word  "strip" and search for synonyms and then try and figure out the history of the expression "break a leg", which has little to do with an actual incantation  for bodily injury, being an expression  used to wish good luck  to actors staging a play, instead.  

 I reflected  that in an earlier time, people often opened religious texts written in the older languages of the world and accepted the first phrase or sentence their eye fell upon as the message for the day. They dwelt upon it and explored and examined that particular idea at great length.  A version of such engagement had filtered down as routine practice in middle school as well, wherein the thought of the day would be written up  in chalk on the general notice board and would be copied out by the class prefects on the black board of each classroom.

 I thought back to the debates we had over "honesty is the best policy" and  the conclusion we reached about how "make hay while the sun shines" discussing both opportunity and expediency.   Group activity with the spoken word was the practice of the local community that heard  the Hari katha being read or attended an exposition of the Ramayana Epic at a gathering.  For those who wanted something more modern, there were LP records, with a range of music and  readings of plays and poetry. and more recntly,  gatherings to read out one's poetry. How had I exchanged all those diurnal  spaces to engage with  a single word and phrase? It seemed a very odd transaction and a rather meagre returns  altogether, in retrospect.

 I was overwhelmed with the feeling  that I could do more for my gray cells and  for the pink cells in my heart as well as  the silver cells in  my soul. The gray cells are the one that occupy my brain at rest and become golden when illumined by ideas. The pink cells live in my heart and inhabit my emotional life, while the silver cells of my soul help me to process and think through ideas and make me examine closely the choices I opt for. Since then, I have signed off on all the wordle and phrazle Whatsapp  teams I was a member of. Now new wordles no longer serve as clickbait. 

 I have gone back to doing spellathon in the daily newspaper. and the odd Sudoko. However, I  have figured out why I had graduated to Worldle Inc  in the first place. The daily newspapers that set up a page of quizzes, cartoons, crosswords and sudokus and spellathons  have now collectively concluded   that mindful pleasure is not to be offered  as a premium to every interested reader.  For those of us still buying newspapers, the cover page is a shout out to IAS aspirants and those in search of coaching classes. However, the entertainment page has been shrinking year by year, column by column, inch by inch, word by word and alphabet  by alphabet. The crossword squares are miniscule, the crossword clues. themselves, grow smaller by the year. The spellathon has also shrunk, but the font can still be read by the naked eye. With the exception of the Hindu which has a decent sized sudoko, doing the crossword and sudoko  in other newspapers  causes severe eye strain. The other curious  thing is that newspapers offer easy and cryptic crosswords, but provide a  solitary black and white square  for writing out the answers. . The logic seems to be as follows: You can either do the easy crossword or the cryptic one. We do not believe in choice. This is odd, isnt it? As the buyer of a newspaper, surely I have the right to do  both the  easy and the cryptic crosswords? How do I write down two sets of answers in a singularly marked square?

" No, you cannot have such a choice;" the newspapers seem to chine in unison. "We are developing unidimensional  proto-types.  These are meant for people who need not strain to read the small print, literally and figuratively." 

" Could you not have larger fonts and illustrations and  provide  the easy and the cryptic clue crosswords their own individual black and white boxes?  Surely such an act will not put newspapers in the red?" For this anxiety of mine , there is no answer. Newspapers no longer have conversations with their readers.

 Undeniably,  nothing newsworthy has been  published in India of late. So  this is not a clarion call for an increase in the size of the font for the Editorial, Opinions, Letters to the Editor or Report pages.  All I want to know is this: What  is this malice  that has gripped the jugular of entertainment?  Surely, the  entertainment page can provide more joy by the use  of larger fonts?  Are we not to be allowed any mindful pleasures at all? Are we being made to  follow the Kartavya path, whereby  all pleasure and laughter must be relinquished? Small wonder then that newspapers, without any real news, without any arguments, without any legible infotainment and with  diminutive  fonts aggravating reader-discomfort are losing out to the digital world. The font size in the digital world and the material for viewing  continues to be attractive. I can watch Pathan on Prime TV and  amazing, award-worthy documentaries such as The Air We Breathe on You-Tube.\ and Meiyazhagan on prime time. If newsprint is losing out to the audiovisual film, it is  not because "the times, they are a changing," it is because the fonts of newsprints, they have "been  a shrinking," along with news and views for a long time now.