At the risk of offending Readers Digest fans, I must confess that my heart sank a trifle when I heard that a major media house was doing the corporate hootchie-kootchie prior to taking over the desi verison of the rag from the Tatas. Hell’s bells, what they smoking? As every raddiwala knows, the Digest (when was the last time a magazine was so aptly named?) was conceived by the Wallaces purely with a view to neutralising Pravda. The CIA decided Uncle Sam needed more than Mom and apple pie to balance all those fascinating boy-meets-tractor-and-lives-happily-ever-after stories the Russkies were disseminating. One can forgive the editorial team at the Digest their various crimes — all’s fair in love and war — but was there any need to drive the last nail into the coffin of good reading habits by publishing “Condensed Classics”?
Imagine giving Chekhov 25 pages or restricting the Bronte Sisters to fifteen? Condensed milk yes, classics no unless you have the attention-span of a housefly. As anyone who has been in a dentist’s waiting room can testify, the only thing more painful than a root canal without anaesthesia is a dose of American propaganda. If that sounded harsh, then clearly you haven’t been subjected to ‘Drama in Real Life’, featuring the kind of goody-two-shoes Americans kitschily represented in “Richie my Son, my Enemy.” This tearjerker outlines the saga of a Bible Belter, John, who dealt with his drug-taking son Richie, in a manner more suited to Tupac Shakur than Abraham; remember the fond father who was all set to finish off his son Isaac? Tupac, as rap fans may recall, was messily done to death by a fellow artist who apparently taunted him saying, “Hey Tupac, you decided to pack or not to pack?” before despatching him to the hereafter with a well-aimed bullet.
John packed — a 38 Special, to be precise — and having offed the fruit of his loins in the course of a family quarrel, had the bad taste to relive the entire sordid episode in print. I’m as broadminded as any Baba, (well maybe not) but this kind of garbage masquerading as “wholesome family reading” is indigestible, if you’ll forgive an awful pun. Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn versus the Digest and the Russians still lost the Cold War; clearly it wasn’t just ICBM superiority, it was good old boys washing their dirty linen in print. Even my Aunt Jeffy, a lifelong fan, had to admit it was ‘totally banal’ when pressed to defend her choice of reading material.
Ironically the Digest, as it was commonly known, occupied a lofty position among the Parsi community: roughly on par with Lagan-nu-Custer’s Last Stand. Family arguments were settled and uppity, know-it-all second cousins squashed in the bawa fraternity by smacking the offender with a copy. As in, “Pervez dikro, don’t try to teach me about the ‘Berlin Wall/Sex Life and Smoking/Laughter is the best Medicine’, okay? Saala, my General Knowledge is top class because I read the Reader’s Digest, okay. Ab bas karo, just pass the dhansak and some kachumber.”
My old headmaster who subscribed to a gentler dictum than “sparing the rod and spoiling the child” unwittingly hit on a more cruel form of punishment. An incriminating copy of “Playboy” or “Penthouse” found in one’s locker meant not just confiscation but an imposition: the pimply offender would then undergo the ordeal of committing to memory purple passages from, “How we escaped over/under the Berlin Wall” before repeating the same in front of the class. The Digest was considered exemplary discipline for badly-behaved boys in those times and I blush to think of the hours of sentimental torture I once inflicted on my hapless classmates.
But I mustn’t be too harsh: back then the Digest was considered “classy” and while the identity of the contributor remains one of life’s unsolved mysteries, one anecdote in the medicinal laughter section took place in my boarding school in Mt. Abu. Roxy was a good boxer but with poor bed-making skills: his counterpane would be untidily flung across the bed, the sheets lay creased and crumpled, the pillow was left un-plumped and worst of all, stray ends of the bed-sheet would be left trailing on the floor. Matron, dressed in her best Freudian slip, once summed it in true Digest style: “Roxy, my boy, if you don’t tuck your sheets in properly, you and I are going to fall out someday.”
