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Shyam G. Menon

First, the cable guy was difficult to locate, then he became a distant need, and finally, a resort ambience replete with quietness came to prevail.

It was many years ago that an hotelier in Kochi spoke of his island resort in Lakshadweep with no television or newspapers on its premises. You wake up to the sound of waves, see swaying palms and clear blue sea. No remote to switch on the television from your bed, or the morning paper to go with your coffee.

The story set alarm bells ringing. What would happen to journalism if days away from the media were to be a premium-priced experience? It was like turning off oxygen, certainly so for one from the profession. People holidaying in absolute peace on an island in the Arabian Sea, while a few hundred kilometres away in Kochi, my bank account slowly evaporated!

Terrible.

Those days, vodka was the preferred poison. It was duly called upon to check visions of life as a newspaper boy on the city's wharf, begging people to read. One by one, they turned around and said: "We have been to Lakshadweep.'' Luckily the vision, like a bad hangover, eased with time.

A decade later, it is Lakshadweep at one's home in Navi Mumbai. At least partly, for the idiot box hasn't seen life since a house-shift late September. First, the cable guy was difficult to locate, then he became a distant need and, finally, a resort ambience replete with quietness came to prevail. At day's end, the house one returned to had a pleasant stillness to it. No raunchy film song, family drama or the cricket score that could have been but never was.

From being the hot machine that spewed desperate headlines of doom and frantic Dalal Street calls for profit, to the jukebox that almost played item numbers on demand, the Onida portable now looked a devil in retirement. Sulking lifeless in a corner, its glass façade, once a splash of psychedelic colours and flickering lights, now a mirror reflecting the bachelor sparseness of the room around it.

The carelessly wound power cord sat atop the box like a neglected turban coming loose, the remote faced the wall, seemingly banished to a futile life of trying its powers on stubborn cement.

That wasn't all. There was even a time in the initial period of stay, when the morning newspaper failed to arrive. Frankly, its absence wasn't regretted. From merely informing, the newspaper too had transcended to being a resident judge, delivering to your table uninvited attitudes on living. From saying `this happened', the game had graduated to `did you know?' And if so, `what about you then?' and on to the more irritating `haven't you done anything about it?'

And so on, it went, the list of allergies caused by existing was on the rise. That the newspaper boy didn't know of a new occupant in the building, helped. So much less of the competitive world invading one's living space. The news, the quasi-news, the pseudo-news, the planted news, the great bylines — all ceased. One was waking up to a day as it was, without yesterday's stains and tomorrow's worries. Life, opinion-free.

It didn't last long. In Mumbai, with limbs and heart in distant places, information is key to survival. What if the suburban train stopped or there was a riot on your route? Not to mention the informed hordes everywhere from suburban station to office. What if you made a wrong move and got squashed like an ant in an elephant herd? Or got your tail snipped in the rat race?

The whole city moves like the human tide at Churchgate, first one way, then the other. If the tide insists information is key, learn to be its subject. Or risk your bones, driving up a one-way street. A strong case for the idiot box to return, but that is too strong a dilution of newfound tranquillity. So, it was the newspaper that gained permission to enter.

A couple of newsprint rolls stuffed into the door grill every morning like a message from the owners of one's world — read up and shape up or shut up and ship out. Inside the house, that surrender has lifted spirits in predictable quarters.

The sulking box, its blank screen acquiring a more bemused shade by the day, is counting on the yin-yang principle. Life is after all a balance between contrasts and one day, the cranky occupant's Lakshadweep syndrome should end.

And an urban life shall be reborn with full hypertension on offer 24 hours a day, bombs where you want them, stock market scares as you like them — you name them, it shouts them. A flat to acquire, its occupant, exiled to Lakshadweep.

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