The news of former Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav being sentenced to five years in jail for the fodder scam under his watch was reported in the same old way by most newspapers which think readers do not have access to radios, TVs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.
Not The Telegraph.
The Calcutta newspaper, with its tongue in rosogolla-lined cheek, telescopes into the future and enters the world Laloo will see in 2024, which is when he will be become eligible to contest elections once again, after a six-year hiatus following his release.
Laloo will then be 77, Narendra Modi will be 74, Rahul Gandhi will be 54, and Hema Malini—whose smooth cheeks became Laloo’s yardstick for smooth roads in Bihar—will be 76.
While those are all real possibilities, The Telegraph also looks at the less real possibilities—like Sachin Tendulkar still playing and pondering his retirement, like Hillary Clinton ending her second term as US President.
Along the way, the paper also wonders about whether the print medium will be around in 2024:
“Watch this space. If newspapers are still around the way we know them, we will tell you how right or wrong we were.”
Also read: The last newspaper will be printed in 2043
IJR 