Waiting for the Weekend

Of late, apart from Sundays, Saturdays are also the days I’ve begun to look forward to, quite eagerly in fact. Not that I do any hair raising stuff on weekends but a couple of months ago, ‘The Hindu’ started issue its Metro Plus supplements in an interesting tabloid form on Saturdays, calling it ‘Metro Plus Weekend.’ I was hooked to it from its first issue onwards. Since then the Saturday mornings have become something to wait for anxiously. If one loves reading papers then I guess others with similar inclinations can understand it. Of course, the Sunday papers are something else. Every one waits for them.

On Saturdays the ‘Metro Plus Weekend’ has a picture of a celebrity, usually a Hyderabad based one, on the cover. I’ve found that, so far, more number of women celebrities featured on the cover than men. Anyway, inside the supplement there is the interview with the same celebrity and a host of other features that make it an interesting Saturday morning read that gives the weekend a real holiday touch.

But of course, it is Sunday, especially the first Sunday of the month I am dying to hold the papers in my hand. ‘The Literary Review’ supplement is issued in ‘The Hindu’ on the first Sunday of the month and hence the almost fatal anxiety to read it. It is one supplement no one who loves to read books can afford not to read. I feel terribly glad to read the fine articles, reviews and trivia in it, but last month there was something in it that was quite disappointing. In fact it is something that was not in it that caused the disappointment.

Last month’s “Literary Review’ was something like a translation special with articles on the translations in various Indian languages. There were articles on translations in Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and even Oriya literature but not one about translations of Telugu works. Though Telugu is not my mother tongue but having been born and brought up in the land of Telugus I’ve come to love the language. Hence the disappointment at the glaring omission. There are classics in Telugu that are unrivalled both in content and style. I also admit that I do not read Telugu works except for the newspapers occasionally but that does not preclude me from feeling disappointed.

But what surprises me is that there isn’t a murmur of protest from any quarter that Telugu translations were completely ignored in The Hindu’s Literary Review. I wonder if any of the Telugu authors and translators read it.