Bangalore: IT engineer Alok Sharma is reading Times of India newspaper from his college days. He recollects during that period, he commanded lot of respect among his peer circle.
A family trying to get more value out of the newspaper
This was all due to the deep knowledge he had about Bollywood, Hollywood and Kingfisher models. All these and much more he acquired by regularly reading the said newspaper.
Alok said, “When I started my engineering, there was no internet. Neither me nor my friends were rich enough to buy the magazines which would have helped us to acquire deep knowledge about things that we were interested. This newspaper was available to us for less than a rupee which was good enough for most of our need. It had plenty of material a stressed engineering student needed at that time.”
Alok added, “Once you are addicted to the kind of stories you get from the leading newspaper of India, very difficult to live without it. Anyway like me most of my friends were not looking for civil service exam preparation. Even after getting my dream job in IT sector, I continued my good reading habits, would carry my paper to office bus. During office commute, I would not hesitate to completely open the pages of Bollywood times so that people behind me can see what the newspaper owner would have wanted its readers to see & read.”
Alok spoke about the transformation he had after watching the Koffee episode where Alia Bhatt fumbled on the question to name current President of India.
Unlike others Alok had sympathy for Alia. Alok said, “May be she was like me, got time to glance at few pages of this newspaper. Slowly slowly I realized, without Google I am nothing. Then I decided, I must do something about it quickly before people mark me in the bracket of KRK.”
“Like any financial expert would advise me, I started calculating to see how much value I get from the newspaper thrown at my doorstep every day. The 150 bucks I paid as part of monthly subscription, what I was getting in return. I will search for hours to find something useful to read to enhance my knowledge. On weekly basis, I will sum total the values I got from the newspaper, most of the time it was pretty much nothing. Whereas the bulky & thick newspaper filled with advertisements, Masala news had plenty of resale value. Close to 100 bucks I was able to get from Raddiwala in a month,” Alok said.
“After polyethenes were banned, I was getting more than what I was paying to my newspaper vendor. I did not know till then my humble paper had so much resale value. Basically the news (if you want to call it so) was coming free of cost. Read it if you feel like otherwise leave it,” he continued.
Alok concluded by saying “I have learnt everything has some value. How much & in what manner you can extract from it, that is your skill. Now I have taken up another challenging task. There is a news channel which is known for creating a lot of noise post 9 PM. I am trying to extract something useful and knowledge worthy from those noisy hour discussions (if you want to call it so).”
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