Dear Mr Bhoothalingam,

Greetings from “The Hindu”!

We hope this letter does not cross one of your weekly letters. For the last six months, we have been receiving a letter from you with unfailing regularity addressed as “Letter from a Concerned Reader”.

We have been compelled to write a reply to you. You have always addressed the letter as a “Concerned Reader.” We have a problem with both the words “Concerned” and “Reader”.

Here are our observations.

Firstly, the usual concerns expressed by you are not the issues that is becoming of a century old newspaper like “The Hindu”. We have waited patiently for long, hoping that your concerns will voice people’s concerns, but your concerns are mostly self-centred and are at most concerning your locality.

Some of your letters express concerns that a harried husband has with an intelligent wife. If your wife uses your muffler to make curd or you and your wife cannot agree on what to order while you eat in a restaurant or she does not allow you to boil hot water in the gas stove, how does that become a social concern . Your marital difficulties of adjusting with your wife cannot be made into a societal or global concern. We would like to point out here that we are impressed with the personality of your wife, Ms. Mangalam.

Some of your letters express concerns of an old man who cannot adjust to the generation gap with the millennials. If you cannot accept your son’s desire to grow a beard like Kohli or you dislike your young relative to binge watch web-series on OTT platforms, how is that a social problem. As a forward looking newspaper, we do not wish to be seen as ‘luddites’ criticizing new technologies or new trends that are sweeping the society. We need to be attractive to our advertisers also.

In one of your letters, you did raise hope by bringing up a concern regarding the difficulties of managing a household budget, that can be seen as a problem that touches our reader community. But, when you proposed the solution that the household budget may be balanced by stopping the Hindu newspaper itself, we could not publish your letter.

Secondly, we are surprised that you call yourself a “Reader”, that too a loyal reader of our newspaper for the last 50 years. Your vocabulary could at best be graded as fifth standard level. Even there, you resort to vernacular expressions which no spell checker can catch. For example, there were no spellings suggestions for ‘mannangkatti” in MS Word. The partial transcriptions of the conversations you have with your wife and son cannot be taken as some play or a skit script.

Your disgust for learned people like Raogaru and Dr Gyanam makes it clear that you are an anti-intellectual and you surely would have never read any of our lovely editorials and features. We guess you only read Classified advertisements in our newspaper. These advertisements usually have English similar to yours. They are published without any of our editorial inputs.

Most of your letters end with “Yours in exasperation”. Please do not pass on your frustrations to us. We have a newspaper to release every day.

As India’s national newspaper, we have the responsibility of guarding the English language in India. It is a different matter altogether that North of Hyderabad not many people take us seriously.

Without meaning to hurt you and disrespect you, we urge you not to send any more letters to our newspaper.

We suggest you could send them over to some digital publications. Digital publications usually publish anything, true or false.

We value your readership. May we request you to let us know the contacts of your wife Ms Mangalam. We would like to invite her for some of our events for women leaders.

Wishing you a happy retired life!

Regards,

The Editorial Desk.