Newspaper Reading In Mumbai

Walking and reading.

Hindi daily

News has gone digital at internet speed. Mumbai and the rest of India too. But a majority of us continue to prefer the daily newspaper delivered home, picked up at the local newsstand and some even read it at a neighbourhood newspaper reading stand.

Peeking over the shoulders of newspaper readers can reveal a lot about the city and us, the people who populate it. Many of us are addicted to solving crossword puzzles, older people scan the obituary columns looking for friends and relatives. Classified ads are still as popular. The daily Mumbai local commuter continues to bury his or her nose in the daily newspaper to avoid other commuters packed like sardines in a tin. Newspapers bring retired old men to the local reading stand sponsored by a political party. Migrant labourers and high flying executives catch up with the politics in their home state through newspapers, in their mother tongues. In the backseat of the cars the husbands read the sports page, the wife looks up discount ads in the glossy supplement on their way to work. The readers of newspapers that sensationalise crime and are willing to pay 3 to 4 times more for it than they would for a regular newspaper. The first thing fresh arrivals to the city look up in Mumbai are employment newspapers or the classifieds for paying guest accommodation. And we all can’t resist reading old newspaper that are used for wrapping.

The types of newspapers in Mumbai (and other cities of India) are as endless and varied as the people of this diverse country. Here are the images of the newspapers readers from Mumbai and her sister cities.