Constipated about reading magazines

I subscribe to two magazines at home: Forbes India and Reader’s Digest. I took up Forbes for a two year period because of the amazing introductory price that was offered. And with Reader’s Digest (RD); well, who wouldn’t want to read RD, even more with the way they keep turning out annoying ‘confirm your address for the luck draw’ mails in the post.

Forbes India shows up at my door step on the first and the third week of the month. RD shows up when ever it likes. For many years I was forced to read magazines that were ordered by the adults at home. Barring Tinkle and the occasional center page poster from Sportstar, there was little to choose from in terms of taste. There was always plenty of variety though: The Week, Outlook, Gruhashobha, Overdrive, Top Gear, Women’s Era, Competition Success and names like that. As age caught on and the teenage years kicked in, Tinkle and Sportstar were replaced by the auto-car reviews by Adil Jal Darukhanawala’s crew. And the distress columns in some other publications, but we won’t go there.

The longing was always to subscribe a magazine that I wanted, for subjects that I cared about and I paid for. Given my taste for things and my constant pursuit to up my IQ points a couple of notches, Forbes was an obvious choice. I was also told that people who appreciated jokes that made you tickle and longed to feel included in this world read RD. So, I couldn’t say no to that either. But little did I know then what I know now: that when one decides to start subscribing to the RD, the editors there sense it in the ether and start showing you ways of getting rich quick overnight in a lottery where every number wins.

I gobbled up every word of almost every article in the early editions. When the new editions arrived, I carefully took the expired one and placed it in the book rack and as the months rolled by, I ensured the chronological order was maintained. All this collective wisdom could just come in handy, you never know! I wasn’t the one to sell this off for its weight.

And then, marginal utility showed up. Like with all good things in life except one, this too came to end. I soon realized that I had stopped reading the editorials in either of the magazines. Soon after, articles on China and Health care were being skipped and the Word power column was for my one and half year old cousin sister. And then, it got to a stage where I read only what interested me in the publication, and most of them half way through. These are busy times, and the world knows it. Before I knew it, there were magazines that were untouched. The weeks would go, and the new edition would arrive. But the plastic cover had still not come off the previous edition. And I like reading my magazines in chronological order for I like to know the sequence of events. I learnt that a long while ago in school, the importance of chronology. They always taught us history before current affairs.

So with this obsession for reading magazines by their date of publication, I soon found myself in a position where I had magazines piling up and time slipping away. Soon my subscription period would end and they’d stop sending me the stuff. I began to feel obsolete as such; how sharp can I possibly be reading June’s news in July? This was like buying French Fries from McDonalds and taking it home to stuff it in the cupboard to eat it someday when you felt hungry. “What sense did that make?” I asked myself. It was me at the vortex and the magazines in a swivel. I had bitten off more than I could chew; chewed more than I could digest, and digested more than I could … you get the point.

I found a way out luckily. All the months of reading the magazines had rightly up’d my IQ a couple of notches. Instead of trying to read and assimilate everything from both the magazines, I now decided to focus on getting just one point out of each magazine. Any one good article that makes me laugh, or teaches me something useful and makes me wallow in misery is all I aim for. This ways there’s no pressure and my IQ continues its upward march. In 12 months, I would have 24 (Forbes) + 12 (RD) new ideas that worked/will work for me. Over a period of 5 years, that number would be 180. So if my projections are right, I’m well on course to winning the title of Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in Davos by 2021, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by 2030, and the Oscar the following year from then. Not to mention a couple of bravery awards between now and 2020.

My current challenge is to apply the same principle of ‘1 idea per magazine’ to the 2 newspapers that come to my house each day, and the hundred thousand online publications I read every hour.