Morning trysts with history: Why newspapers still matter in the digital age

Arriving early for the premiere of Tesseract: The Geometry of Truth at NCPA in Mumbai last week, I was riveted by the exhibition in the foyer, featuring key archival front pages of The Times of India, as well as editorials and cartoons. In the first act of the show, history as recorded by TOI during its 187-year history flashed across LED screens on the stage; I got goosebumps as I could recall seeing many of those photos and stories over long ago morning cuppas.

The young student who immolated himself at the height of the Mandal agitation, the editorial marking the fall of the Babri Masjid, the report on the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the heart-wrenching photo of a young Rahul being consoled by Rajiv Gandhi, those pages set off flashbacks in my mind. The links of those events with contemporary India were obvious too, reiterating that journalism is indeed the 'first draft of history' - and newspapers are the medium.

Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that few young people read print newspapers these days. They get their morning fix from coffee and news both delivered in shots, not from chai and the crackle of newsprint. They don't know what they are missing. Today algorithms second guess and drip feed only the news, views and advertising online that people already like and want, obviating any serendipitous introductions to new interests that are inevitable with newspapers.


Newspaper readers will surely agree that they offer a panorama of news and views, chronicling the diversity of daily human experience for posterity. Besides the usual familiar topics, there are also stories that unexpectedly pique interest. I look forward to those surprising nuggets the most. In fact, the handiness of the internet has enhanced the joy of finding such items in the morning paper as they can be instantly explored further. It's a happy complementarity.

Till the advent of the internet and email, newspapers were one of many tangible contemporaneous archives. Physical books, letters, diaries and files were parallel sources, supplementing the broad sweep of newspapers with personalised perspectives. The latter have now dematerialised into emails, blogs, e-books and e-files, stowed away virtually in a cloud. Those may become largely inaccessible once technology evolves newer gadgets to chronicle and store data.

The prodigious archives of newspapers - like TOI's - are thus our solid bulwark against the vanishing sands of time. As the exhibition at NCPA demonstrates, especially to the younger generation who are no longer familiar with news being purveyed in a physical broadsheet format, every day on Earth was, is, and will be a mix of good and bad, horrific and beautiful, concerning and uplifting. So unlike the unidimensional monotonality of those curated online newsfeeds.

Newspapers now have online versions in PDF (portable document format) too, of course, wherein entire pages are reproduced on screens. Those for me are a poor but often necessary alternative to the OG crisp newsprint avatar, especially when travelling. Still, at least they also provide a delicious smorgasbord for eclectic news gourmands like me, albeit without the tactile aspect - like partaking of a generous thali meal with a spoon or fork rather than with fingers!

Most importantly, someone in the future reading an archived newspaper of a particular date and year will get a peek into the gamut of happenings of that time, not merely the concerns of an individual. In a way the exhibition of pages from TOI's archives underscore that our world, like a tesseract, has multifarious planes, some of which we are not even aware of but should be. Newspapers, unlike newsfeeds, are reflections of humankind, not just each one of us.