11/21/2023 0 Comments Boston globe crosswordThe first Marathi crossword was created for Loksatta in 1948, and did so well that, in 1958, Jayantrao Salgaonkar, who had been setting them, quit to set up Shabdaranjan Spardha which put crosswords in Marathi papers across the state. They then moved to Mysore to print a magazine with simple crosswords and “set up collection depots to receive entry forms and fees, appointed local collectors and invited the people by advertisements in the paper to participate in the competitions.”īeyond such dodgy territory though, crosswords continued to grow. The issue kept coming up: were crosswords a game of skill or chance? And by then the answer was looking a lot like the latter.Īs Chief Justice of India Sudhi Ranjan Das described in his verdict in State of Bombay vs RMD Chamarbaugwala the crosswords in question were the means of a major operation run by the respondents, who had earlier run the Littlewoods Football Pool Competition until Bombay banned such prize contests. The BMC didn’t agree and his proposal failed, but crosswords had to face a series of legal challenges in the years ahead. “These things are a poison not just to the poor classes, but also to the middle classes,” he insisted. In Bombay too the BMC president protested that crosswords weren’t gambling, but Viegas was adamant. ![]() In 1928 crossword competitions were sued in court there for being concealed lotteries, but this failed when the judge tried to solve them, and when he found it tough he agreed they were games of skill. This was an accusation that had come up earlier in the UK. He said young people were wasting their time with these puzzles and suggested they were a concealed form of gambling. As a past BMC president his words carried weight. In October 1929 in the Bombay Municipal Corporation AG Viegas proposed “the prohibition of the sale of Goa lottery tickets, cross-word puzzle and other competition advertisements”. Who has not felt the joy of seeing the last square or two ‘come out’, after delving into a heap of books and maps?”īut not everyone had such a positive view. By 1928 ToI admitted that the crossword was more than the brief fad it had seemed to be: “It is absorbing and fascinating, giving a mild amount of mental stimulation and recreation at the same time. And in summer when the city’s elite departed for the hill station of Matheran ToI reported that “attacking the cross-word puzzle” was the chief occupation there that year.įrom abroad it reported heavy demand for dictionaries in libraries in the UK, while in Budapest censors ordered the screening of crosswords to stop them being used to send code. ![]() Tongue in cheek, it asked if the late release of the government’s annual agenda was due to “the fact that government servants were too busy working out puzzles in a well known Bombay weekly?” A lady correspondent enthused how crosswords were a boon for “lonely women in mofussil stations”. ToI would only start a daily crossword on Ap(The New York Times held out till 1942), but the paper saw its potential and put one in the IWI as an experiment. By December that year ToI was listing The Cross Word Book among books that had recently come into India. It was an instant hit in the US and was picked up outside as well. This came out in 1924 (helpfully, the book had an attached pencil). ![]() The real catalyst was the first compilation. And he continued to set a monthly crossword for Air India’s Swagat magazine where, he says, many of its fans were his fellow bureaucrats who had to fly the national carrier. ![]() To help them learn the tricks and techniques he wrote a book on how to do cryptics, which went into three reprints. These are the ones for true cruciverbalists (crossword devotees), but Singh knew many people were put off by their apparent difficulty. “It was a way to make crosswords popular,” he says.Īs a young IAS officer he still managed to find time to do two crosswords daily, and not the easy ones but the harder cryptic crosswords with coded clues. He qualified for the IAS and at the academy in Mussoorie he devised crosswords that included names of batchmates and professors. As a young IAS aspirant from Bihar studying in Delhi during one such strike he used the unexpected time on his hands to start doing crosswords - and he never stopped. Delhi University teachers’ strikes rarely have productive outcomes, but for Vivek Kumar Singh it was different.
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