We Need Help

Sometimes it’s difficult to justify my own behavior—especially the surreptitious visits to the entrance of my house. No, it’s not the fear of any monstrous apparition at the door but the wait for the daily newspaper. Just the sight of it gives me the impetus to hurry up with my morning chores---I can’t wait to lay my hands on it but I have to wait because once it’s mine, I’m carried away to another world. The feeling is almost transcendental…but who’s going to do the breakfast then? So, wait.

Ah, I have the house to myself now…and the newspaper after the daily morning chaos of school, work, crying babies, useless spouses, etc. The first thing I am confronted with is choice. With the number of supplements mounting every day, each of equal importance to a reader like me, newspaper reading is no mean feat. Which one…which one…? Finally, I remind myself of the main objective behind reading the newspaper—the news. But where’s it? A frantic search…eighteen pages here, eight in the next, six thereafter…so on and so forth. There is a bit about some silly political activity (more often than not as a tribute to the ruling party), a wee bit about the city we live in and the rest—a feature fete. Every educated individual in a democracy is a political, financial, or social analyst of sorts and everyone’s opinion counts…at least in the newspaper. Gone are the days when this privilege was confined to a select group featuring on the “editorial page” only---they are facing some tough competition now. As for my state, I am literally pleading—“God, please help me read this feature, analysis…whatever…till the last line…please.” I really cannot help it, you know. I have to know it all since it’s there in the newspaper—if Sachin should continue or not, why Rani can never win the Oscars, why is Amar Singh angry, why is there a painting in so and so’s house, why so and so’s clothes do not fit her any more…Ugh! You can say it’s a moral obligation…I don’t want to disregard a writer’s effort. Moreover, what if I miss something? I pay for it, after all. Anyway, I am dead tired now. Try and understand, I have been reading thirty-six to forty large size pages with fine print everyday in these stress-prone, time-pressed times.

When my reading obsession, bordering on an addiction, is quenched by ogling at the plastic faces flashed all over the pages, I am in no position to keep myself straight. I am in dire need of sleep to get over the mind-boggling experience of trying to register everything of ‘inconsequence’ into my little head. Sleep…it does come but not alone. It takes me to a space again infested with newspaper objects-politicians, criminals, page 3 starlets, painted faces floating in the air clamoring for publicity, pushing and shoving one another for headline space until the scene slowly transforms into a crow-fight…and I sit up, perspiring and gasping for breath. I need help.

Much later, when I am back to where I belong—my house, my family, I have only one thing to dread. I just hope my husband does not ask me, even casually to show that he cares for my interests or even just to initiate a conversation, what I read in the newspaper today. In all understanding, he will still not be able to figure out why my jaws drop or why I look so dumb on being asked such a simple question, absolutely no reason and rightly so according to him, why I should evade this question when I spend the maximum time reading the papers. It is difficult to explain the blackout I experience when asked to share what I read. All I see is endless print and color and not with even the utmost effort can I recall the headlines on the first page. My frustration has got to fizz out and what other way than to make your family feel as miserable as you do with awful mood swings and snappy monosyllables. I tell you, this reading ambiguity is affecting my marriage. I need help.

Well! In order to overcome my recently acquired anxiety problems associated with my daily newspaper reading, I assume I have to wait till technology provides me a means to scan, read, and register the newspaper in record time because as per existing trends, the pages are bound to increase. Else, on the basis of what may become of my mental state, I can say it will not be long that I will be visiting a shrink who will be treating me for the new disorder on the anvil known as, with due respect to the namesake, the “daily news and analysis disorder.” We need help. If not for nothings like me, at least for a bigger cause--the environment, I plead unto all, “please do away with this compulsive waste of paper”. Don’t you realize how many trees are being felled to bring about this disorder? Bear with me but I am already imagining a sick me reading this heap of a newspaper without any water because I am sitting in a desert. I am sorry for being an extremist but some things are heard more when said in an unlikely fashion.