A Tour D' Indian Newspapers

Since there are three major English newspapers in India and none of us knew which was best, we figured we would get them all for a few weeks, pick one, and then cancel the other two. While this seemed like a great idea at the time, we forgot to factor in the fact that the newspaper is delivered every morning at the crack of dawn, and none of us is willing to get up to tell the delivery guy to stop bringing two of them. We’re also a bit confused since we have now been receiving these papers for close to 6 months and still haven’t been charged for any of them. Apparently just as it’s not worth it for us to get up early to cancel them, it’s not worth it to the delivery guy to come back later in the day in order to get paid. Unclear.

This has, however, given me the chance to explore Indian newspapers even more than I’d care to. In comparing the three I’ve realized they all follow the same pattern, which is decidedly better or worse than American newspapers, depending upon the kind of news you actually care about. Now that you’re just dying to know, I’m sure, what these newspapers are all about, I will spare you the cost of a plane ticket to India and give you a brief virtual tour of The Hindi, Indian Express, and Hindustan Times.

The front page generally contains real news about India, as well as any story that links India to the US. One of my favorite examples of the latter is a story that ran a few months back about a man in the US who was attempting to sell intelligence secrets abroad. For those of you with excellent critical reading skills two main questions should arise: what does this have to do with India and why on earth did I not hear about this? First of all, this man just happened to be on vacation in India a few weeks before the whole thing came out. Clearly, this justifies him as important Indian news. The reason you didn’t hear about him is that whatever intelligence he had it clearly wasn’t very useful because he was attempting to sell it for … 80,000 dollars (insert Dr. Evil voice and me putting my pinky up to the corner of my lip). I don’t know a whole lot about the CIA, but from watching 24 I am pretty sure that the good stuff doesn’t sell for the same price as a Land Rover. I like to think that the article was written by some Indian intern at the newspaper who stumbled upon this story somewhere online and decided to play up the India connection and wound up with a front page article.

The majority of Indian newspapers are devoted to celebrities, and Bollywood gossip gets an entire section in the paper every day. How glorious is that? I mean can you imagine if there was a way to get the current New York Times with half as much news and a whole section with Hollywood gossip? And daily, I mean waiting for OK! To come out each week is so painful. The love of celebrities carries over to the international “section”, which is one page in the back. This will always have one story about the US, one story about China, a section of the weirdest stories they can dig up, and a section about American celebrities. They are excellent about citing their sources, which is really too bad because sometimes it’s just better not to know. For example, today’s international page had two articles of about equal size, one of which discussed how the US was raising funds for Haiti and the other discussed recent rumors of Miley Cyrus’ possible engagement. So at least for today they really did get the most important international stories, I’ll give them that. In the midst of the Miley article they cited that their article came from information gathered GossipCop.com. Seriously?

The Indian press got a huge kick out of the whole Tiger Woods thing, it was on the front page here for weeks. I’m not sure if it was the downfall of the seemingly perfect or the general enjoyment of an American scandal, but they papers here just couldn’t get enough of it. The highlight was when one of the papers created a special website where you could go for “real-time” updates on how many women Tiger had slept with. Mostly I just felt left out of that one though because without an iphone or blackberry I could only check it once every few hours, which clearly is not real-time enough.

The Sunday papers carry an added bonus, which is the matrimonial section. This is sort of like the personals ads in the US, but for marriage instead of an awkward dinner. They all follow a standard pattern, and you quickly learn the importance of understanding the lingo and how to read between the lines. They are organized by caste, although some of them say “caste no bar”, meaning they will accept someone from any caste. Having fair skin is a huge plus, although people also list themselves as wheatish, which means slightly darker. Men list their job and then request either a professional woman or a woman for the home. Women list their degree if they have one but rarely their job. Many women list themselves as “homely” which I assumed meant they were good at setting the table and dusting. One of my Indian friends informed me that no, that in fact means they are virgins. My bad.

You heard it here first

I always suspected I was a trendsetter...like that one time in 7th grade when I bought that Abercrombie shirt and everybody copied me...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/travel/10places.html

Number one: check.

I'm dreaming of my Sri Lankan Christmas

Ok, so before I go into Sri Lanka, is anyone else freaked out by that 2010 in the lower right corner of their screen? It looks so crazy! Ok maybe that’s just me. Anyway, Sri Lanka is absolutely amazing and I would completely recommend it – and at $30 a day for a room on the ocean and 3 meals you really can’t go wrong. It reminds me a lot of Hawaii except without all the development. Oh, some background: so Little Ditty is sadly no more as Diane fell ill in September and went home for some R&R. She is doing well, but decided not to return and we definitely miss her here. As they say, Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone…Okay that actually makes no sense at all but I tried. My other roommates, Aakash and Monisha, visited family over the holiday, but Jack and I both thought it was too far to go all the way back to the States and headed to Sri Lanka instead.
We started in Bentota, a beach on the West Coast, which was literally deserted except for about four people. It was amazing. We bonded with a rickshaw (or Touk Touk, as they are called there) driver, and he took us out on a boat ride and to a waterfall where we could dive in off the rocks. The waterfall was also a bath for about 20 Sri Lankans, who got a huge kick out of me attempting flips off the rocks. Next we spent a day in Galle, which is an old fort that looks straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. We headed down south to an incredibly beautiful beach, although along the way we could see a lot of destruction from the tsunami. We were actually there for the 5 year anniversary of the tsunami, and although it was clear there had been a lot of development, you could still see concrete houses where the roof and some of the walls had been completely washed away.
Mirissa, the beach in the south, was cool because it was also fairly undeveloped but did have the requisite thatched-roof bars right on the beach and was a great place to celebrate New Years. We brought in 2010 with a random group of Brits, Germans, and South Africans who we had met during our time there, and it was great to be out on the beach in January! The last few days we decided to get off our lazy bums and did some hiking in the interior. We also completed a Buddhist pilgrimage, which consisted of hiking over 5,000 stairs up a mountain to a temple. The craziest part was that in order to do it right you are supposed to be up at the top of the mountain for the sunrise, which means you start the hike at 2am. We thought it seemed slightly crazy, but sure enough there were about 100 Sri Lankans hiking along with us in the middle of the night!
I think for both Jack and me the highlight was definitely when multiple times we got confusing looks from people and they asked if we were Indian. I mean nothing marks the 6 month anniversary of our stay in India better than being mistaken for a local! You basically can’t survive in Delhi unless you get really good at bargaining, and we both tend to adopt Indian accents when we bargain. Apparently we’ve gotten so cheap that several times we would be haggling with a Sri Lankan and they would get a confused look on their face and then say…wait, you from India?
The only thing missing from the whole Sri Lankan experience were the trashy magazines. It was literally painful for me to be on the beach without US Weekly or People – I mean it’s pretty amazing I even survived at all now that I think about it. I got super excited when I found one copy of Cosmo in the Colombo airport, and of course grabbed it and took it up to the register. The price? Twenty two US dollars! Unbelievable! I mean I love my Cosmo but even I have my limits. I settled for a Newsweek instead. Lame.