ON THAT NOTE

Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world but later decided to leave it as it is

Are magazines set to kill the internet? Our columnist Suresh Menon reminisces on a tradition that lived on for decades at clinics and barbershops.

Ihaven’t checked out doctors’ waiting rooms lately, but going by barbers’ waiting rooms, it would appear technology has removed from our midst yet another feature of our childhood. I speak, of course, of the magazines that were kept on tables in these waiting rooms. It was probably against the rules or something, but there was nothing more recent than anything two or three years old; so if you needed a haircut and hadn’t been keeping in touch, you might discover – thanks to a magazine – that man had landed on the moon, or that Bill Clinton was in some trouble at the White House. I remember someone once running out, waving a magazine that informed him that the Beatles had been sighted in India.

Just as television killed the radio star, and the internet killed the television star, the cell phone killed the waiting room magazines. In the old days, no one would have realised this till three years later when, waiting for a haircut, he would pick up a magazine to pass time and read about this latest killing.

Often the magazines had no covers, and you wondered what you were reading. Was the headline ‘Obesity is good for you’ from a parody magazine, an advertisement for fried food topped up with aerated drinks, or from a scientific study misunderstood by the editor? Reading was only part of the fun; the other part was figuring out what magazine it was and just how seriously to take all this guff about moon landing and Paul Newman winning the Oscar.

Sometimes the articles were so interesting that you allowed the person next in queue to go ahead of you while you finished reading them. ‘Three of my teeth have been smashed, and it is paining like the dickens, but why don’t you go ahead while I see how this story turns out,’ was a sentence often heard in the waiting rooms.

As a boy, every month when I went for a haircut, I caught up with what was happening in Bollywood (or, more accurately, what had happened in Bollywood two years earlier). Some of the stories were hair-raising, making it easier for the barber to do his job. Perhaps that was the intention, although I don’t remember any horror magazines in that lot.

All that is history now. You read magazines on your phone, you use the time to text and catch up with friends, you check your bank balance, you download images of cats.

You no longer choose doctors or barbers based on the quality of their waiting room magazines. Perhaps things will turn full circle soon, and print magazines will kill the internet. Remember, you read it here first.