In our Times

Those were the times when a newspaper was considered a conduit through which the knowledge of language reached the masses, thought the old man. Back then, the worth of a word was more than a mere urge to fill an empty space. An error was guaranteed a corrigendum, the next day. The crossword was meant for the connoisseurs, not the amateurs; The comic strips were a work of art; Even the advertisements bore the stamp of an erudite. Back then if one walked the streets with the Times in hand, people bowed. With these thoughts he dozed off as the warm winter sun fell on his horn-rimmed glasses and the reflection made a little yellow jelly-fish on the ceiling.

I sat there wondering if I felt closer to the generation that thinks like the old man, or the one that believes in a hot cup of  expresso and the Facebook homepage as the natural beginning to a bright day. Ours is a generation stuck in the middle, I said to myself; Mindful not to throw away all of the pedagogic learning of childhood, yet inclined to take a bite at the forbidden Apple that the kids hold out to us.

The old man was fast dreaming by now. In his dream the sun was yet to rise. He heard the whistle as the Canadian engine drew closer. As the fumes dispersed he could see the bundles of newspapers dumped on the platforms, waiting for small-town vendors to carry to faraway lands; Lands where the cock was yet to crow and the eyelids remain shut in slumber. He breathed a sigh; and the warm air exited his nostrils much like the engine.

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted bitter, and I liked it that way. I had started to read a book that morning, but the online news sites kept constantly throwing mediocre articles in fancy fonts at me. I could neither ignore them nor feel content at having read something good. So I hopped from one article to another till my mind felt as bitter as my tongue. Just the vagary of a human mind, I said to calm myself.

Meanwhile, the old man dozed away, in his arm-chair. In his dreams the newspaper boy was riding the Atlas bicycle from the station towards the town. The cycle meandered through the narrow lanes and creaked constantly with the heavy newspaper stack tied to the rear carrier with a strong coir rope made of coconut fibre. The boy paused, rolled a newspaper to form a rigid tube, tied it with rubber-bands at the ends. He then aimed at his client's door and threw it in a wheeling motion, with deadly accuracy; Like always! As the missile hit the door and fell with a light thud on the doormat, the old man smiled. The lad must have been the best marksman he had seen. And he had been one himself but with the gulti (sling) in his younger days. 

I impatiently took another sip of coffee, and picked up the newspaper that lay beside the old man's chair. The rustling of the twenty-two pages did not help settle my mind. It had been so long since I had held a newspaper that I found it almost impossible to relocated the latter halves of the front-page stories. I felt like a mouse in a labyrinth. After reading a full article, the forehead ached. I went back to the familiar comfort of my laptop.

The dream meanwhile continued to play merrily in the old man's head. He was spending a similar morning with a steaming cup of tea with the Times just delivered at his doorstep by the boy. His Times lacked the bountiful access to information that lay on my lap. But it provided him just the grist his mind wished for. The headlines, the editorials, the crosswords, the laughter columns, the comic strip, and sports column et al. As I watched him smile in his slumber I wondered if it was a deliberate condescending smirk to mock me. Me, and my generation with its endless playthings and rudderless desires. I wished so much to wring him up and yell at him that ours is a better, faster, stronger, higher and superior generation no matter what his senile mind may think. But even as I thought of it I knew these were tall claims. Perhaps Nimrad felt this way after he built his tower and realized that it was gargantuan structure of nothingness. So I waited patiently for him to wake up. I had lost. And through that loss I felt the power of calm, the urge to listen, the patience to persevere, and the humility to learn. He woke up, smiled, carefully wore his specs and started narrating as I listened, "In our Times..."