Tongue in cheek, it asked if the late release of the government’s annual agenda was due to “the fact that government servants were too busy working out puzzles in a well known Bombay weekly?” A lady correspondent enthused how crosswords were a boon for “lonely women in mofussil stations”. ToI would only start a daily crossword on Ap(The New York Times held out till 1942), but the paper saw its potential and put one in the IWI as an experiment. By December that year ToI was listing The Cross Word Book among books that had recently come into India. It was an instant hit in the US and was picked up outside as well.
This came out in 1924 (helpfully, the book had an attached pencil). The real catalyst was the first compilation. And he continued to set a monthly crossword for Air India’s Swagat magazine where, he says, many of its fans were his fellow bureaucrats who had to fly the national carrier.
The tick crossword editor how to#
To help them learn the tricks and techniques he wrote a book on how to do cryptics, which went into three reprints. These are the ones for true cruciverbalists (crossword devotees), but Singh knew many people were put off by their apparent difficulty. “It was a way to make crosswords popular,” he says.Īs a young IAS officer he still managed to find time to do two crosswords daily, and not the easy ones but the harder cryptic crosswords with coded clues. He qualified for the IAS and at the academy in Mussoorie he devised crosswords that included names of batchmates and professors. As a young IAS aspirant from Bihar studying in Delhi during one such strike he used the unexpected time on his hands to start doing crosswords - and he never stopped. Delhi University teachers’ strikes rarely have productive outcomes, but for Vivek Kumar Singh it was different.
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