A nose for news

Two days after India won the cricket world cup last year, Vijay Shekhar received newspaper clippings of the team’s feat that had appeared in more than 25 editions, sent by friends from across the country. Shekhar, a resident of Aminjikarai, has collected more than 250 news clippings of events from across the world in the past 20 years.
“I collect articles that can be classified as ‘breaking news’.Most of them are about deaths, accidents or natural disasters,” he says.
“India’s world cup win is the happiest thing to have happened to the country in two decades. Otherwise, 60% of the news I have collected is tragic,” he adds. Shekhar started collecting newspaper articles when he was a 17-year-old student in Jamshedpur.
“Rajiv Gandhi’s killing in 1991 was sad. But as a young boy, news of the former prime minister’s assassination excited me and I decided to save that day’s newspaper,” says 37-year-old Shekhar.
“I started saving clippings of any article that I thought was important in shaping the country.” He has articles on the Columbia space shuttle crash, the World Trade Center bombings, Osama Bin Laden’s killing and some fascinating ones such as Lord Ganesha drinking milk.
Shekhar, whose family is from Kerala, lived in Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata before moving to Chennai. He has friends across the country who help him collect articles from leading Hindi and English dailies. His prized possession is the Independence Day issue of the Delhi edition of ‘The Statesman’.
“I found a book about old newspaper issues at the Kolkata book fair and decided to approach the editor for the August 15, 1947 copy,” he says.
It took him three months of meeting different officials at the newspaper to get the copy. Other old issues on Shekhar’s wish list are those of the 1983 cricket world cup win, man landing on the moon, and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. He often reads the articles he has collected.
“Who knows if print editions of newspapers will still exist in 20 years. My collection could become invaluable,” he says.
(This is a weekly series that features the people who collect odds and ends, from stamps and coins to racing cars and rocks)