This Month's Literary Review in "The Hindu'

The Hindu Does It Again With a Front page Ad

On Saturday it was with mild irritation that I opened ‘The Hindu’. The front page was plastered with a full page advertisement that began just below the masthead and occupied the entire page. This is the second or third time the paper is springing this surprise on its readers. Somehow I do not like when the papers do things like this violating the front page. I don’t know about others but I feel damned irritated. Sometime back the paper’s Reader’s Editor had justified a full page ad on the front page citing commercial compulsions. It was quite ironic that in the inside pages of Saturday’s Hindu was P. Sainath’s lament that newspapers were giving in to the corporates' right to sell over the right to inform the reader.

It is when papers you trust do these sort of things that one feels like taking all their own sermons about others (greediness of BCCI for instance) with a pinch of salt. I don’t know if the management is aware of how much loss of credibility the paper suffers whenever it does things like it. The loyal readers having no other choice other than to continue to read the paper will esteem the paper a bit less and bunch it with other papers who have gone all the way to be fully commercial.

This is another indicator that the paper is going the same way as one paper that began the price war, reduced the size of the paper, sold out its front page including its masthead. Now only one thing is left, the sort of pictures it publishes. When those kind of pictures appear in my paper I will shift to another.

‘Literary Review in ‘The Hindu'

Yesterday, for a change, the paper was delivered on time. In fact it was delivered before the normal time taking me by surprise. I took out first the ‘Literary Review’ for which I was waiting eagerly since a week. The front page was taken up by two articles on translation. Later in the day at Abids I found one nice book that was a translation of a Hindi novel. I will write about it in the next post.

Pradeep Sebastian’s column was lifeless and I found it too commonplace a topic. Inside were two articles relating to Naipaul. One was about Patrick French, his biographer. The other article was on Naipaul by Rumina Sethi. Coincidentally, in the evening’s “Just Books” program on NDTV there was a special interview of Patrick French.

There was one interesting book reviewed in Literary Review` and that was Meenakshi Mukherjee’s ‘Elusive Terrain: Culture and Literary Memory’, a collection of her essays about various aspects of writing in India. I am going to buy it though it is priced at a wallet-emptying Rs 575.