24 February 2013, 07:01 PM IST
Growing up, it was an unspoken rule of some kind, that middle class homes with any pretensions to education, must have as part of their drawing room display, a row of Reader's Digest magazines, preferably bound. They took pride of place on the showcase, which was otherwise populated with that peculiar collection of chintzy odds-and-ends that went under the grandiloquent label of 'showpieces'. In some ways, a set of RD magazines was the most eloquent showpiece of all, for it spoke about the respect enjoyed in the household for knowledge and the English language, although not necessarily in that order. Like the certificates in a Doctor's waiting room, or the name-plates with extended and sometimes exaggerated qualifications adorning the front door, copies of Reader's Digest were symbols of re-assurance, radiating an aura of accessible erudition. It was the literary accompaniment to other signs of mobility like a sunmica dining table and a sofa-cum-bed.
But in spite of its uses as an object of display, Reader's Digest was much more than a badge of honour; it was a magazine not only read but devoured in its sectional entirety. Written simply and clearly, the magazine combinedheart-warming stories of the human spirit with little nuggets of humour and self-improvement, packaged in a worldview that was gently conservative for the most part. Reader's Digest was chicken soup for the soul well beforethat phrase became a franchise. Sections like Humour in Uniform, Life's Like That, Laughter Is the Best Medicine and It Pays to Increase Your Word Power' sat side-by-side human interest features like Drama In Real Life as wellas regular features on health and medicine, written often from a first person perspective (article such as I Died At 10:52 and I Am John's Spleen, if one remembers correctly). The rear section was brought up by a book, re-written and condensed to make for easy reading.
The magazine was sold by subscription, which meant it had became a regular feature in our lives, materialising out of the ether, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Its articles were never really topical which meant that they could be savoured at any time, and i remember many pleasurable summer days, where the annual vacations would be leavened by multiple readings and re-readings of magazines that were dug up from the innards of the family home. Each new issue that was excavated brought joy, and if one chanced upon the compilations of the condensed books that were published from time to time, it was a bonanza of manna-esque proportions.
All in all, it was a package that was at ease with the middle class mindset in India, by virtue of its lack of over arching ambition. The fact that it covered so many aspects of American everyday life and that it was written inaccessible English, made it desirable as well. In an unobtrusive way, Reader's Digest lifted us from the surface of our lives and attached us to another world. It believed in the power of education; in its implicit view, to know more was the only way to be more. Its size and its determined lack of scale made its stories universal; one focused on the people rather than the lifestyle they led. The American Dream in the Reader's Digest scheme of things was less about consumption and more about the power of things that most people across the world relate to-the inner strength of human beings, the power of relationships and the need to forever strive to improve oneself. If the other artefact of American life popular in India at the time, Archie comics, painted a picture of dates with blondes and ice-cream shakes, theworld evoked by Reader's Digest was comfortable but never acquisitive. It lived in the time of consumption but before it mediated our lives with quite as much authority as it does today.
Like most effective instruments of popular culture, RD, propagated an ideology by making it appear effortlessly natural. By eschewing overt argument in favour of stories about the ordinary, it told us about the validity ofuniversal human values but by implication, insinuated that these were realised most fully in the American way of life. If Enid Blyton made our childhoods pale imitations of life in England as we eked out an existence withouthot buttered scones and potted meat sandwiches and Commando comics made us to the Western worldview a sense of presumptive legitimacy as we went along with the easy stereotyping and hair-raising racial abuse that was heaped onits enemies, Reader's Digest made us sympathetic to the conservative worldview without trying too hard. We saw the world most easily from this vantage point, believing without difficulty as to who the good guys were.
It is not difficult to understand why the magazine is facing bankruptcy today internationally. The idea of a magazine as a thali of gently cooked wisdom, located in a world deeply satisfied with its certitudes does not resonatewith readers anymore. Reader's Digest needed a time when values were fixed, where it played the role of steering us back to the stable centre, one tip at a time. That world no longer exists; every label has come unstuck and every definition has turned liquid, be it ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In India it continues to do well, but even here it no longer carries anywhere near the same meaning it once did. Its loss of significance began way back when a new generation of magazines came into existence beginning with the hot-blooded Stardust, which while living in a different space, changed the reader's interaction with and expectation from a magazine. In the world ofhyper-stimulated media and mercurial ambition, the voice of Reader's Digest is too timid to be heard. Once upon a time it was pitched perfectly, but today it is too conservative to be interesting and too gentle to be considered conservative.
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