FIFTH COLUMN

Pocket Money

By C K Lal

Time flies. I realized that once again when I discovered that I have been contributing to this publication for almost ten years now. A decade is a long time, and it went away without anyone noticing it.

Somehow, publishers of this paper never felt it necessary to deliver a complementary copy to one of their most regular contributors. I buy a copy from the stands whenever I feel like, or when I am prompted by phone-calls from friends to check out something in particular. Otherwise, it’s not often that I get to read this paper.

Whenever I buy a copy, the first thing that I scan is the Tittle Tattle column. Having penned that trivia for a few months once upon a time, I know the difficulties involved in compiling it. It’s an easy read. After all, its variety and informality simply can’t be matched on any other page, in any other column.

Few days ago, a friend faxed me a piece of TT from an issue that I had missed. It comments on a columnist of The Kathmandu Post, and it’s absolutely hilarious. I am happy that humor is once again staging a comeback to TT.

Try this for sheer audacity, “..columnist have to rigorously and routinely meet deadlines, fill space (and their pockets).” Rigors and regularity of deadlines are facts of life for any columnist, Tattler included. Filling space is also an important consideration, as many of the entries on TT itself can reveal to any reader. But, columnist filling their pockets? May be it was a misprint, or it crept into the text inadvertently. Or, as my friend insists, it probably is a peace of joke intended to cause laughter.

It has been my good fortune to have contributed articles to many contemporary English publications of this country, to quite a few of them on a regular basis. I think that qualified me to say something about the remuneration that a columnist gets for his troubles, and I tell you, what one gets is nowhere near anything that can fill even a tiny pocket with smallest denomination paper notes.

Just to give you an idea, without quoting correct figures, what yours truly has earned by writing this column for almost a decades can’t buy him a reasonable quality laptop. What he has earned from everything that he ever wrote for all publications, over a thousand pieces at the very least, can’t buy him a second or third hand Maruti.

If that confuses, let me put it straight: earning from this column can’t pay for a single vegetarian meal at a decent restaurant in Kathmandu, and even The Kathmandu Post is only a marginally better pay-master. I am wondering at the size of the Tattler’s pocket, unless she/he gets paid many times over than me, it must be very puny indeed, pun very much intended.