Sunday, October 5, 2008
Saturday 4th October 2008
“Is there anything I can do for you?” asks the manager of the newspaper’s printing press. He has the six of us in his spotless office, and outside we can hear the whirr of machines and the sharp smell of ink. He sits straight and clasps his hands before him. His smile is fixed, and his eyes fill with excitement. We’re not sure what he can do for us. He prints our daily paper already. Karsten, a Californian with a dry sense of humour and dead-pan delivery, looks confused. “Show us the printing press?” he asks. The mind boggles as to what else he might expect us to need. A job? A souvenir? Some lifestyle advice? Evidently, he felt that we required a glass of coke, for these duly appeared on a silver tray.
The press is located an hour’s drive south of Delhi. It’s one of two presses our newspaper owns, and prints the majority of the 3.7 million copies, along with the 773,000 copies of it’s sister paper, an economic journal. They’re delivered everywhere, even to the remotest areas of the country, and all before mid-morning.
Back home, in my household at least, a weekend paper is bought and remains untouched all week. It’s eventually banished to the toilet to curl at the edges. But then, almost everyone is literate: what’s there to prove? Here, newspapers are genuinely guzzled, perhaps because their smaller size makes them that little bit less intimidating. “I bought the New York Times once,” an executive editor at our newspaper had once said. “I could barely carry it up the stairs.” I found the $4 worth it just for the wedding section, but didn’t feel that this was an appropriate comment to make at the time.
But in India, having a newspaper delivered is a sign of literacy. Poignant when you consider that almost a third of the country is illiterate. These things are precious, and a sign of status. The choice between tabloid and broadsheet is a question of age rather than class.
The printing press is a Methuselah, a monster made of rolls of paper the size of several breeze blocks, speeding belts of newsprint crossing each other like a series of enormous white ropes and pulleys, and crisp folded papers which snake to the ceiling and around to the mailroom. Here, they are cornered and packed by swift metal arms, before being shoved in the direction of a team of young men. They swing the bundles on the back of trucks as if they were aid packages. “manual labour is cheaper than machines in India,” says the manager. “Unlike the West.” We try to avoid guessing just how cheap.
We are lead through a yellow perspex door and told to take of our shoes. We’re about to enter the temple of the printing plates. “Are there everlasting gobstoppers in here?” quips Karsten. It certainly seems possible that we might soon be bundled into a boat and sailed down a chocolate river, or at least one made of ink. Two engineers sit in front of glowing screens, examining the PDFs of pages for the day. I think of my days as editor of my university newspaper when, at 4 am, our phone would ring off the hook, nudging us to send the paper. Voices would get more agitated at the press until they broke into a threatened refusal to print. These men seemed too relaxed for all that. Huge printers churned out precise aluminium plates for the cyans, magentas and yellows. It was a masterpiece of fine tuning. I cast my mind back to the student days and felt a pang of guilt.
At 4 am, we drive through the sleeping city until we reach the outer circle of Connaught Place. Amongst the shadows of colonial columns, a glow emerges. Turning the corner, we are met by the bustle of newspaper vendors, each of them scurrying between piles of newspapers, gathering their supplies for the day. It is one of several such ‘depots’ spread over the city. It was extraordinary to think that across this huge country, thousands of vendors were now doing the same. It is like a newspaper carnival, with the same trucks we had seen leaving the printing press backing up to drop off their heavy load. Somehow everything is counted, and each of the 400 vendors, known to the staff, is given their usual share of the booty.
Some set out the multicoloured carpet of their magazines right there, waiting for the early morning commuter rush that will begin in a few hours. Others have spread out blankets, or makeshift mats made out of old newsprint. Sitting cross-legged upon them, they count their papers and place the supplements inside. As the sun rises, they gather up their bundles, loading them onto the back of their bicycles and mototbikes and speed off to their beats around the city.
It’s a simple system, and a manual one. India is still a manual society. Though mammoth machines and precise technology exist to do the most pressing of tasks, there is nothing as cheap here as the human hand. And these cheap hands are the lucky hands. Vendors, packers, those that mop the factory floor: all of these are more economical for their bosses than a robotic arm. In restaurants and cafes too, more staff line the walls than would be needed to wait tables in the busiest of lunch hours. Outside taxi queues and tuk tuk lines, men hang around who seem to have no use at all. Uniformed figures sit at road blocks fanning themselves under umbrellas. People are cheap, so why not have more people? Why have newspaper shops, or vending machines, when a man can sit on a street corner, or throw papers into houses for the price of a 30% markup on the 2 rupee paper they deliver?
It’s surprising that the legacy of manual labour seems to exist in a country that is known for its rapid industrialisation. But this is a side of India that may never disappear. And, in the newspaper distribution business at least, it doesn’t need to.
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