Magazine reading

Dear MINHAZ MERCHANT,

I am only 54 years of age.

I had an urge to read anything even the paper in which ground nut was wrapped.

My parents fed my thirst despite the middle class financial constraints with all sorts of books and my elder brothers who were working and earning and had good aesthetic sense and tastes inherited from my parents helped us get access to all sorts of magazines from Science Today to National Geographic to Readers' Digest to many vernacular magazines in Tamil through magazine clubs.

So crazy I was I bought copies of few years of Resurgence, The New Internationalist, The New Scientists magazines which were disposed of by British Council in 1992.

In addition in 80s most days I used to visit Madras University library and on every Saturday I used to visit British Council library for magazines from UK , Alliance Francaise for magazines from France, Max Muller Bhavan for dose of German and of course Theosophical society Madras which had many excellent magazines including surprisingly the best ones on management studies.

Unfortunately, nowadays,  almost all news, views in most magazines, news papers, news channels are politics centric or everything is politicized including a study on decline of bee population or cultivation of new variety of rice.

But after 1982 and more precisely from 2002 onwards the media has slipped so low that from then on I have stopped reading any magazine. In the late 90s I was inducted [my name was Karthikeyan then] as one among a team of International Editors in a magazine which was not run professionally. Valson Thambu used to publish my articles unedited though I used to be very critical.

Slowly I realized he was also part of a bunch of people with hidden agenda.

However the present day media in English in India is almost paid news and prepaid views and social media is rightly killing it for a healthier perspective on many things.

Fortunately for present generation of youth, the media will no more be a mass opinion molding tool because its criminal lack of integrity and bias has reached a saturation point and got exposed and social media throws up lot of options good, better and ugly unlike media houses which provides only bad, ugly and horrible.