I grew up with a house hack that turned the morning newspaper into more useful things as the day marched on. The newspaper was folded and laid across the breadth and length of shelves in the kitchen to help soak up wet utensils; it was used as an added layer on shoe racks to catch the dust falling off the soles; it was used to wrap old gifts that had outlived their occasion and might never get opened for use; it covered new shiny steel utensils that were only just bought and kept aside for that special festival cooking; it was pasted on a part of a crumbling wall to dry out a damp patch (and buy us enough time to earn the money to fix it); it was used in craft classes to stuff dolls with, or, to pack handmade puppets with; it was what lit our bonfire on cold winter nights, and, the first thing we laid our hands on when we opened the morning doors —the newspaper was everywhere we looked and lived in the house. But, news never overwhelmed our world, it rarely entered domestic conversation.

Today, there isn’t even a single sheet of newspaper in the house. And yet, somehow, news today has a cunning, crafty, oppressive power over us, the kind it never had all those years when it lived quietly amidst us.