CONDITION USED GOOD, FOREFRONT, FRONT PAGES FROM THE TIMES OF INDIA , HARDCOVER, 1988

> Having to sell in a highly competitive market, news is slowly turning into a commodity all over the world, forcing newspapers to pay more heed to how it is packaged. This was not always so. Indeed, for a long time the more sedate newspapers were allergic even to the idea of splashing news on the front page for fear that it might become sensationalized. The Times of India carried on merrily for over a century, featuring only advertisements on the front page. That is why this sampling of front pages from The Times of India’s files—brought out to mark the paper’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday anniversary—is confined largely to the last fifty years. Although the paper began its career on November 3, 1838, as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (and assumed its present name on May 18, 1861), it started displaying the more important news of the day on its front page only on January 1, 1940.

> The independence that came seven years later, the changeover in editorial control from British to Indian hands, the steady increase in the business of elected governments—both at the Centre and in the states—and the gradual widening of public control over the national economy all contributed to a much more comprehensive news coverage in the papers. Although this period witnessed more startling changes in the international scene than ever before—with the defeat of the fascist powers, the victory of the Chinese revolution, the end of colonial rule almost everywhere, the intensification of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, and the piling up of nuclear missiles by both sides taking the balance of terror to ever new levels—the growth of affluent societies in the West, the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower, the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam, the landing on the moon, fantastic advances in technology, and the wholesale computerisation of offices and factories around the world meant that the country was so preoccupied with its own problems that space devoted to developments abroad gradually shrank in most national newspapers.

> Thus, while The Times of India always found space for the more important international developments, its front page was largely taken up with the convulsive changes at home that affected nearly every aspect of national life. Coping with the trauma of partition, the acute food shortages of the fifties and sixties, the frustrations of one plan after another, and the increasing turbulence of political life, the country has had to wage a continuous war against a sea of troubles. With half-a-dozen or so front pages for each year, the present collection manages to touch on some of the more important happenings at home—but they are more an aid to nostalgia than to understanding the chequered course of recent history.

> This selection of front pages will send many readers strolling down memory lane, inducing them to recollect, in quiet contemplation, the raw emotions they experienced when they first imbibed the news of one dramatic event or another along with their morning cup of tea. There will be some regret at the passage of time, heightened by the feeling that things did not always turn out well and that some problems, which once looked manageable, were allowed to get out of hand. Moreover, even though some of the headlines from the forties or the fifties might now seem remote, many readers will be surprised to find that they still retain a hint of the hope or poignancy that once attached to them.