I’m no newspaper freak. I think I used to be, before I realised how else I could spend my time. We used to have a band of friends who would discuss endlessly on every damn thing on earth. Intensive newspaper reads actually would help you to get one over them during those times. At the risk of sounding too old, I can say that when I grew up, technology had not started swallowing us. By the way, I love technology.

My professor in college used to tell us that we should read newspapers not for following the news but to improve our English. We had this habit of reading the papers and noting down those words that we didn’t know the meaning of. That way, all that it became was to go looking for the words that we didn’t know. It sure improved our vocabulary but not sure if it improved our English. But then, good vocabulary is always mistaken for good English.

I used to wonder how about half a dozen daily papers each have 24 pages of news to publish on a daily basis. It’s impossible to do this on a daily basis without using a lot of garbage. There must be a lot of recycled news, outdated news made to look new, unimportant stuff being made like the president is assassinated and such stuff. There’s gotta be a lot of nonsense in there. It’s not practically possible to run daily papers full of quality, reliable news published fully in compliance with the ethics of journalism. That’s not the reason why I don’t spend too much time on papers.

I just feel that it does not deserve too much time. It simply does not. In my school/college days, it helped me to gain brownie points because I knew about something in detail. I’ve grown up now. So I don’t need that. Nowadays, I’m not even sure if I can claim that I ‘read’ the papers. I just browse them through. I can call myself a ‘headline checker’. Anything that catches my eye, gets my attention. I have this in-built scanner that helps me look at only those things I want to see. The maximum time I spend on the daily newspaper would not be more than 10 mins. That’s all. The way I see it, newspapers are a source of information. There are various other sources such as the internet, the television and the people/friends who read newspapers. Quite a lot has changed. Newspaper and Radio are not the only sources for us to get information.

At times, it does make me look a little stupid because I don’t quite follow the news as people do. Someone asked ‘did you see the news about the octuplet’? I could make out that it had something to do with eight. I thought octuplet meant a verse with eight lines. I just don’t care though because I know the exact difference between intelligence and knowledge. Timely or otherwise, knowledge can always be acquired. I have not yet lost anything because I’m not spending more than 10 mins on papers. Of course, I’ve gained a lot. See, I’m not spending that time on blogging. Writing vs Reading.

Yes, I missed that ‘octuplet’ news. I don’t think that news of use to me but I would have at least learnt that term ‘octuplet’. Now that I have learnt a new word, hope I get to use it often. Octuplet.