Editorial
Here we are, 2111 issues later,
on a Saturday morning reading The Doon School Weekly. It’s been over 70
years since Dr. H.S. Bhai, the first Editor-in-Chief of the Weekly, took out
the maiden issue of this publication- 29th February 1936. The school has
come a long way since its inception, and the Weekly has been with it all the
way- keeping pace year after year.
Looking through the old Weeklies, it struck me how similar it is in spirit
if not in style and idiom even now to what it was like then. Back then, the
focus used to be on what had happened during the week (News In Brief in
other words), and articles by boys weren’t too many. I also noticed that
they had gossip and humour columns where they took a swing at masters and
Doscos alike. Over the years, this unique ingredient hasn’t disappeared and
we try our best to be (respectfully!) irreverent. It just goes to show that
the legacy of it all has been handed down batch after batch.
From typewriters to computers, from manual formatting to Adobe Pagemaker,
from sending dispatches to receiving emails, the functioning of the Weekly
has evolved with technology down the decades. The genre of articles has
changed: write-ups on IB, poems on death and destruction, ‘roving eyes’ and
so on. Through the decades, the Boards have come up with novel ideas to make
the Weekly more reader friendly: Doonspeaks, Unquotables, Opinion Polls and
the Penguins.
Change is a constant; that holds true for the Weekly as well. From a weekly
to a fortnightly and back to a weekly. But to quote another truism: the more
things change, the more they remain the same.
In this issue, we decided to walk down memory lane and share with the school
community two extracts from the past.
We have come out in this garb today in order to
celebrate our 200th issue. It is a long way that we have travelled, through
the years, nor has our path always been a smooth one.
It is a long cry back to our first issue, which came out on Saturday,
February 29, 1936. This issue bore the charming and naïve legend:
You can/Influence people/With new friends/Attract money/Enjoy superb
health/Acquire a charming personality/Achieve social and business
success/Live a broader and happier life/By reading The Doon School Weekly.
May we, without presumption, still advance these claims for the Weekly? The
Doon School Weekly was then a cyclostyled issue, always graced with a large
cartoon on the front page. It was a very homely affair, with friendly jokes
and wisecracks.
But the Weekly had to keep pace with the progress of the school, and after a
managerial crisis, from Saturday, October 15, 1938, the Weekly became a
printed Fortnightly. The first issue of the Fortnightly advertised these
four aims for itself:
To give information about what is going to happen;
To give information about what has happened;
To provide an open forum for discussion;
To encourage literary efforts and thus provide entertainment for the
readers.
The Fortnightly was Number One, from which we number this the 200th.
Shankar Ramanan (Editor-in-Chief)
“I sketch your world exactly as it goes” will, I hope, be the motto of
The Doon School Weekly.
- A.E. Foot
Issue No. 500, Saturday 12th March, 1955
The 500th edition of the Weekly! My
congratulations to all concerned. It is something of an achievement that we
should be, perhaps, unable to say what the weather will be like on Saturday;
unable perhaps, to prognosticate the result of the House matches, or the P.T
gong; but that we can be quite certain that, punctually at breakfast time,
we shall have our Weekly in our hands propped up against the milk jug. I
don’t think that anything has ever prevented the Weekly from coming out on
Saturday, since I came to The Doon School – neither storm, earthquake, the
departure of the British, nor the disturbances that followed. The Weekly
represents the continuity of The Doon School – a record of the present
keeping in touch with the past, and the refusal to be ruffled by anything
that may happen in the future.
Wisely, I believe, it does not attempt to entertain but contents itself with
recording, sometime, we hope, with a light enough touch to cause a smile. At
one time there was, I believe, a movement for ‘brighter Weeklies’, and a
column was devoted to rather laborious jokes, not all of them original, let
alone amusing. I am glad to see that this has been discontinued. An
occasional ‘howler’ or a witty crack by way of comment of some item of news
is all that is required. ‘Brighter Weeklies’ is a parrot-cry analogous to
‘brighter cricket’. You cannot enforce brightness. The Weekly will be
brighter, as and when life in The Doon School becomes brighter just as
brighter cricket depends on the cricket that is played rather than the
journalists that report it.
What is the greatest thrill of the Weekly? Obviously to read one’s own
contribution. This is, pure vanity but, surely, a pardonable form of the
vice. Everybody has a natural urge to wonder what he looks like in print;
and there is the further anxiety to see how disastrously one has been
misprinted.
You may appear in the Weekly in many ways. You may be recorded as having
made a century; as having secured a distinction in trials; or having scored
a record number of YC’s and RC’s. It should always be your aim to appear,
not as a passive subject for statisticians, but as an active contributor.
R.L.Holdsworth