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I guess no one, unless he were a masochist, loves proofreading...it is a most boring chore.
But back in the stone age when I was at IIT KGP there was no escape from it...the 'phoren' journals used to send us envelopes with the bold legend:
PRINTER'S PROOFS...URGENT
That is because I am a born woolgatherer...my mind strays from any uninteresting chore...like the dog Tiger at Muthukur:
"...Every
owner gives his dog a pet name for sure. The first I heard was when a
new Doctor was appointed to our Village Hospital and he had an Alsatian
which his school-going son used to flaunt to dumb onlookers like me,
throwing a bald tennis ball far away and shouting: "Tiger, Fetch it!".
In one out of two attempts, Tiger did fetch it, running and catching the
ball in his mouth before it landed. In the other attempt, Tiger was
distracted by the enticing stray bitches...there was no Alsatian she-dog
in our Village and the good Doctor was against cross-breeding..."
RKN wrote an essay on these monstrosities. And wondered why the Babu who drafted them had to say: Remitter and Payee instead of Sender and Receiver. And RKN says he was always confused whether he was a Remitter or Payee.
Anyway, I found SDM going through the form he filled up again and again, with his index finger ('pointer' for us layfolks) scanning each and every word to the merriment of his Assistant who was standing beside him. And after he went through his proofreading to his satisfaction, he saw me and passed on the form to me:
"4 eyes are better than 2"
Returning to the wedding cards, I found one where the granpa of the groom was the inviter and I the invitee. And discovered that the grand old gent was inviting us to the wedding of his "grand son" instead of his "grandson"...it just turned out that he had no son, grand or not so grand...he had daughters though.
When it came my turn to compose the wedding card of my son and getting it printed, I was scared.
I took my friend NP along with me in the same spirit as 4 eyes vs 2. There is a middle-class outlet selling wedding card blanks in the General Bazaar of Secunderabad. After we chose the card that I could afford, we asked the owner of the shop if he knew any printer. Of course he knew...they have a symbiotic existence. We were led by his 'boy' to a dingy cubbyhole in one of the nearby alleys to a gent in front of his 'system' and we gave him the subject matter.
The printer was not pleased since it was not in one of the 'sample-formats' he already had in his hard disk. All he had to then do was change the names and places and dates. But mine was personal and unique. There is a reason for this.
I abhorred the 'formula':
"We cordially solicit your august presence with family and friends..."
This 'solicit' always recalled to my mind what the garish girls on the steps of the outlets of Calcutta Free School Street used to do of a night...solicit customers. Now...now...don't go wondering what I was doing there in the night...you are wrong...we were walking a shortcut.
So our compositor was grumbling and did a sulking job and gave us a 'proof' page on one half of an A-4 sheet...he was conserving his stock of papers. And after a proofreading run, we changed several howlers and asked him to correct them and give us another proof. He made the corrections and gave us a second grudging proof.
And we not only found a number of fresh errors but also a couple of inspired corrections of our own draft. And asked him to make the new corrections and give us a third proof.
He blew his top and said he never gives more than one proof. And we had to wheedle him and coax him and entice him saying that we were ready to pay for his extra efforts and paper...otherwise we leave...
After all of 6 versions, we thought we had the perfect thing and went home with the final proof satisfied that we did a perfect job.
And when the deck of 300 cards arrived, I found a wee obscure full stop (.) where there was no need for it.
And I sighed and left it at that. For, I recalled opening several wedding cards to find pen-made final corrections here and there...and how I forgot all about the contents of the card and latched on to the hilarious printer's devils.
There is a moral there...let sleeping errors lie...don't draw attention by glaring corrections.
There was a curious instance where an 'error' looked better than the original.
Four years ago I blogged a piece titled:
"In praise of laziness"
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/in-praise-of-laziness.html
And mailed a copy of it to Shyamal at IIT KGP who had 'influence' with Calcutta's the Statesman. And without my knowledge he forwarded it to the Editor of its "Now & Again" column. And sent me the hard copy of the cutting of the published version a week later.
And I was poring through it and came to the punchline which read:
"And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile ‘work’???"
I got irritated and cursed the Editor for changing my 'through' in that vital line to 'though'.
But on a second reading, the 'though' of the Statesman sounded better than my 'through'.
And appreciated the English of Statesman Editors.
After a while, I was re-reading my blog and found that the punchline of the piece was precisely what appeared in print:
"And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile ‘work’???
The credit for the superior version didn't go to the Statesman...it went to my own devious subconscious...if any.
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