It’s a rainy Sunday morning in Bangalore. The dawn is soft, the air smells of wet earth and with a steaming cup of kaapi in hand, I pick up the three newspapers I read on weekends. Before the first page is even opened, I silently thank the newspaper boy—who braves the cold, the rain and the dogs to place them at my doorstep each day. As I gazed out of the window, something about the rain, the warmth of the kaapi and the crinkle of newsprint pulled me down a long, winding memory lane—back to where my love for kaapi and newspapers truly began.
I grew up in a small town near Nagpur, where access to newspapers was a privilege. We used to get the Free Press Journal in the late evenings. “Breaking news” usually broke a day late—and honestly, nobody seemed to mind. Life was slower, softer, less frantic. News travelled at the speed of cycles. And at the centre of this ritual stood one man: BZ Karlekar—the lone courier of world events to our little colony. A wiry, lean figure on a creaky bicycle pedaling like he carried top-secret government files in that basket of newspapers. We kids would wait for him after school, as if he were Santa Claus on two wheels.
Even today, I find myself wondering what the “Z” in his name stood for. Maybe “Zabardast”, for the punctuality and pride with which he delivered those newspapers.
By the time I reached high school, The Hindu (Hyderabad edition) entered our world—always a day late and treated with the seriousness of a telegram. And in every home, there was a sacred rule: Dad got the first read. Only after he folded the paper neatly in a way only fathers of that generation knew were we allowed to approach it.
The sports pages were our gateway to dreams. India reigned in hockey then, and A.S. Thiagarajan made heroes out of Ajitpal Singh and BP Govinda. When Kapil Dev lifted the Prudential Cup, cricket marched into the limelight, accompanied by the eloquence of R. Mohan and Nirmal Shekhar. Nirmal could write about anything—cricket, tennis, almost anything else—and still leave you spellbound. Eventually, he passed the spotlight to my all-time favourite, Rohit Brijnath, who had the rare gift of turning even a dull sporting draw into poetry.
Newspapers were constantly recycled in our home—they simply changed forms. They became paper bags, wrappers for steel vessels (my grandmother’s wet-paper–stone-grinder creations were legendary!), and of course, the raw material for our homemade kites. Those kites rarely travelled beyond the terrace, but the dreams tied to their thread soared high enough.
By the end of high school, local papers like Nagpur Times and The Hitavada made their entrance—full of hyperlocal flavour and a slow but steady erosion of grammar. From cracking The Hindu’s cryptic clues, we shifted to spotting spelling mistakes in these newspapers like seasoned proofreaders.
Then came a small revolution. A brave entrepreneur opened a newspaper stall in our colony market.
Suddenly, magazines like India Today, Sunday, and The Week were accessible—albeit a week late —but who were we to complain? It was through that little stall that we first encountered the fiery Indian Express under Arun Shourie and Ramnath Goenka—champions of accountability with the ability to topple the high and mighty. And on the other flank stood Dilip Padgaonkar’s Times of India. Editors mattered back then. They shaped national conversations. They had spines of steel and voices that carried weight.
Circle to today and it is not what it was. The Times of India, under Samir Jain, and The Hindu, under the N. Ram family, are shadows of their original selves. What a slide it has been. Owners dictate headlines. Bias is baked into the ink. The once-mighty editors are reduced to mere placeholders—legacies overtaken by lineage.
I glance at my son. A newspaper barely holds his attention for five seconds. Instead, he prefers a carefully curated feed on his iPad—reading selected headlines, devouring a Swiggy-delivered burger and humming along with Fred Again on his AirPods. The printed paper lies on the table, untouched, its relevance fading like yesterday’s ink.
And somewhere in a quiet lane near Nagpur, I imagine old BZ Karlekar still cycling, still determined—wondering not just why the world forgot newspapers but also why no one ever bothered to find out what the “Z” in his name really stood for.
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I am really moved by the words, “the centre of the rituals” which exactly the same in the case of the then GenZ children like me, even two generations before and after us. The newspapers were of different names but the narrative is the same.
By the time Kapil Dev and team lifted the Prudential Cup in 1983 in London, we people started roaming around in search of TVs, deviating largely from the usual MW/SW stream in radios until the satisfactory and privileged offers of FIFA ’86 World Cup in colour television.