Newspaper

It was the early ritual of my school days: wake up, grab the Newspaper before anyone else got to it, and devour every word as if it were sacred morning scripture. Headlines, classifieds, obscure columns on fisheries in Goa or wheat production in Haryana, even the TV listings that nobody read. I used to read everything. So thoroughly, in fact, that my friends teased me for it. They said I consumed “all the useless information,” which was their polite way of saying I had the reading habits of a retiree trapped in a teenager’s body. I didn’t mind. Those pages gave me a sense of the world far bigger than our little town.

Here is a fun fact about my association with Newspapers. I paid through my high-school and college, working for a few local Newspapers, helping with the composition and print templates in Aldus PageMaker.

Then came the 2010s, and like many of us swept up in the gospel of digital efficiency, I stopped. The newspapers were replaced by news apps, then by Twitter, then by nothing. Somewhere along the way, the need to know everything turned into the need to know nothing. I didn’t really plan that transition; it sorta happened, slowly and silently. Then, I stopped the News altogether.

The world seemed noisier. News felt engineered to provoke. Every headline screamed; every story was laced with masala;¹ every argument had to be packaged as a war. I withdrew. For more than a decade, my relationship with News was like a polite nod to an acquaintance I no longer wanted to speak to.

Recently, I picked up the Newspaper again. It started as a trash collector of sorts, instead of the plastic bag, during the Pandemic. After a while, I started reading bits and pieces, here and there. I didn’t return to my old habit of reading every word. Age and sanity have cured me of that. I no longer feel compelled to plough through the political gossip or the sensational crime stories written like screenplay drafts for low-budget thrillers. I skip the masala. I skip the drama. I skip anything that feels breathless or over-seasoned.

But I read again. This time with intention. With distance. With a detached affection. Something about the physical Newspaper still feels honest. Not necessarily the news itself, but the act of reading it. You sit down. You unfold it. You slow yourself to the page’s pace. There is no infinite scroll, no algorithmic trapdoor pulling you deeper. There are edges. There is an end. There is quiet.

Growing up, reading the Newspaper made me feel connected. It was my window to the world beyond classrooms and exam timetables. Today, reading it makes me feel grounded. It reminds me that the world is not just a stream of alerts and hot takes. It is still full of people doing real work, real reporting, authentic storytelling, even if buried beneath the usual circus.

Something is humbling about returning to an old habit with new eyes. The teenage version of me wanted to know everything because the world felt vast and exciting. The adult version of me knows that too much information can make the world feel chaotic and exhausting. So I read differently now. I skim with grace. I pick the bits that matter. I enjoy the cultural notes, technology columns, and the tiny human-interest stories tucked away at the bottom corners of the page.

And strangely, this return to newspapers helps me detach from the noise rather than fall back into it. When you read digitally, you’re consuming news the way junk food is consumed, which is addictive, impulsive, and engineered to hijack your instinct for more. When you read on paper, you consume with a fork and a plate. You eat more slowly. You know when to stop.

Sometimes I wonder how younger me would react to older me picking up a newspaper again. Would he laugh? Would he approve? Would he roll his eyes and go, “See, all that reading wasn’t so useless after all”? My friends certainly would. Somewhere out there, they’re still teasing me in spirit for being the guy who read the property ads and agriculture reports like they were plot twists in a novel.

But the Newspaper has become something else for me now. A reminder of continuity. A small bridge to a past life. A nudge that curiosity should be nurtured. I don’t need to absorb every detail anymore. I don’t need to chase every headline. I don’t need to debate every point. I just read. Quietly. Calmly. Without being pulled into the cyclone.

We talk a lot about going back to basics, but most of us rarely do it. Restarting the newspaper habit is one of those rare returns that actually change something. It reminds me to take things slow. To step outside of the algorithm. To give my attention weight again.

This may be what growing older does. It teaches us to curate not just our time but our minds. It teaches us that information is not wisdom. It teaches us that sometimes the best things in life are the ones we left behind because we thought the future would always be better.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the way I used to read as a kid. That obsessive scanning, that all-consuming curiosity, that unfiltered consumption, it belongs to a younger mind. But I am grateful that I can return to the practice in a gentler, more thoughtful way.

The world is still loud. The news is still spicy. But I don’t have to be.

All I need is a quiet morning, a cup of chai, and a newspaper waiting to be unfolded. A little ritual revived. A small act of reclaiming myself in a world that keeps trying to speed everything up. Some habits are worth returning to. And some stories read better when they’re printed on paper.