DesiPundit

Mercury writes about growing up in Madras, when reading the Hindu in the morning was a daily ritual.  She writes evocatively about watching the creeping onslaught of the tabloids, and the changing face of Madras/ Chennai where newspapers are dumbing down and people are switching loyalties away from the Hindu.

Now the Indian Express is not a terrible paper, it isn’t even a bad paper. But when you encountered such dogged loyalty, as the english-reading masses of Tamizh Nad who are bound to find any alternative ersatz, one must expect it to be consumed with the faint, bitter taste of disdain? And true to form for a long while, I refused to read it, wondering why anyone would spend time with a newspaper that wasted it’s space on colourful pictures - what seemed to me at that time, a testimony of its need to capture readers that could not be attracted by the merit of it’s content.