Read Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma for Free Online

a second lane, and so on; if you kept turning left and right you were suddenly assailed by the groans of the treadle in the Truth Printing Works; and from its top floor a stove-enamelled blue board shot out over the street bearing the sign ‘The Banner’.
    It was the home of truth and vision, though you might take time to accept the claim. You climbed a flight of wooden stairs (more a ladder), and its last rung was the threshold of
The Banner
. It was a good deal better than most garrets: you wouldn’t knock your head on roof-tiles unless you hoisted yourself on a table; you could still see something of the sky through the northern window and hear the far-off rustle of the river, although the other three windows opened on the courtyards of tenement houses below. The owners of the tenements had obtained a permanent legal injunction that the three windows should not be opened in order that the dwellers below might have their privacy. There was a reference to this in the very first issue of
The Banner
. The editor said: ‘We don’t think that the persons concerned need have gone to the trouble of going to a court for it, since no one would open these windows and volunteer to behold the spectacle below.’
    This stimulated a regular feature entitled ‘Open Window’, which stood for the abolition of slums and congestion. Itdescribed the tenements, the pigsties constructed for human dwellings in the four corners of the town by rapacious landlords. It became an enemy of landlords. In fact, it constituted itself an enemy of a great many institutions and conditions. Within twelve pages of foolscap it attempted to set the world right.
    From the garret of
The Banner
the world did not appear to be a common place. There always seemed to be something drastic to be done about it. It had all the appearance of a structure, half raised – and the other half might either go up or not at all. ‘Some day,’
The Banner
felt, ‘it must either go down or go up. It can’t be left standing as it is indefinitely.’ There was a considerable amount of demolition to be done, and a new way to be indicated. The possibilities of perfection seemed infinite, though mysterious, and yet there was a terrible kind of pig-headedness in people that prevented their going the right way.
The Banner
thus had twin work to do: on the one hand, attacking ruthlessly pig-headedness wherever found, and on the other prodding humanity into pursuing an ever-receding perfection. It was an immense task for anyone, with every conceivable equipment and support. It would be a tall order to give an editor. But in this case it worked because the editor had to take orders from only himself. And he felt that, after all, he had not made such a fool of himself as his well-wishers had feared, although the enterprise meant almost nothing to him financially.
    In 1938, when the papers were full of anticipation of a world war, he wrote: ‘
The Banner
has nothing special to note about any war, past or future. It is only concerned with the war that is always going on – between man’s inside and outside. Till the forces are equalized the struggle will always go on.’
    Reading it over a couple of weeks later, Srinivas smiled to himself. There was a touch of comicality in that bombast. It struck him as an odd mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. ‘There is a curse hanging over an editorial table, vitiating everything a man wishes to say. I can’t say “I want a cup of coffee” without appearing to be a slightly pompous donkey,’ he told himself. ‘I wish I could write all that stuff here,’ he reflected, lying on his mat at home. Going to an office, sitting up in a chair at the table – there was something wrong with the entireprocedure. ‘I wish I could do all my writing here,’ he said to himself again and looked forlornly about him. The house was very quiet now because it was eleven at night and all the nerve-racked neighbours and their children were