Q: how bad are our papers? A: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Reading forwarded mails is quite illuminating (that’s because I read barely one in 20, the rest go straight to the trash box — opened, half-opened, unopened, but hardly ever read). And it sure was with this one (check http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20051202.htm) gotten from a friend (a fellow journalist, of course). Ayaz Amir, the Dawn columnist, is always readable. Acerbic, pithy, and stripping his ‘victims’ naked. Completely naked; no wardrobe malfunction here.

“It takes a good two hours in the morning going through a stack of Pakistani newspapers. It takes about half an hour to go through the leading English dailies that you get in Delhi.” It starts off. And trust me, he has you snapped around his finger (the middle one? the poor brain wailed, considering its owner’s living on the payrolls of one of those “English dailies” that Amir is blasting off with full rigor).

And he has you till the last para: “The cautionary tale is for us as we move forward on the road to democracy (a journey which would be made easier infinitely if Pakistan’s ruling general, fourth in a line of patriarchs the country could have done without, is persuaded to shed his fears and his uniform). If we can get democracy without lowering the standard of national discourse or without the pursuit of trivia, that would be a goal worth striving for.”
Heh, eh?

So guess what happens next? Worst journalist opens another mailbox, comes across a suspicious-looking mail with a blank Subject line, from another friend (another frustratingly cynical and cynically frustrated journalist-mate, of course). This one had sent a couple of Guardian front-pages, and dared me to find a single newspaper in India that dares to make such neat, uncomplicated, reader-friendly (and cool, I add) pages that does not ask for hand-eye-brain coordination required only of Tendulkar in the slog overs. I did scratch my head, honestly I did, for about seven minutes, before opening a new file on MS Word (to make all this noise).

Here's one (hit the website — they store the front pages for the last 10 days), and do ask yourself the last time you breathed easy sitting on the pot in the morning. Check how they use the front page as just that: the most important page with 2/3 most important stories of the day (our papers seem to face identity crisis if it’s anything less than five), and the great use of pictures. Most of us would either fall off the chair or faint, or both, if asked to magnify pictures so much as to zoom in on the creases on the forehead; instead, we would go for the whole picture with extra ‘scene scenery’ for added value. But then, that's us. Heh, eh?