I could have sworn that I was reading a sensational news agency dispatch about a 12-hour encounter between militants and security forces in Srinagar valley in Jammu and Kashmir for the word ‘cartridge’ was there, it was as plain as the nose on my face. Then I realised with a sense of shock that what I was reading was, in actual fact, a sad obit, A vice and that the word ‘cartridge’ had slyly inveigled itself in place of ‘cortege’ our old friend, the wily printer’s devil had struck with his characteristic vengeance and skillfully dripped past stout defences put up by keen and hawk-eyed proof-readers, I refuse to believe that Scotsmen are grim visaged folk with little or no sense of humour. Take, for instance, the following obit notice that appeared a few years ago in the Glasgow Herald. It read “Angus Macoherson has left for his Heavenly abode.” The following day appeared a sequel in the same column, “Great anxiety in Heaven, Macpherson hasn’t arrived yet.

British peer Lord Bessborough woke up one fine spring morning feeling fit as the proverbial fiddle and reaching for the newspaper he was startled out of his stately wits to see his name in the obit column announcing his sad demise. Flummoxed, his Lordship lost no time in getting the errant newspaper on the telephone. A contrite sub-editor did apologize, but added wonderingly, “But where are you calling from?” Then there was this obit notice I spied in an upcountry newspaper, “The diseased leaves behind his wife and three cnildren. If newspaper managements decide to crack the whip and come down heavily on the delinquent staff in its printing and composing section and a crimson faced Personnel Manager sends down a grimly worded memo— “Sack that printer!” you can be SURE that the message will get garbled in transmission and it will read- “Sack that painter!”

S. Raghunath