This past week we were called out to help a retired doctor from UBC take care of his recycling before moving this month.
He used to teach Indian studies at UBC and has been collecting the Times of India since 1969. He had the papers mailed here to his office so that he’d have research material for his students. Back in 1969 in the days before the internet, Google, Google News, and iPhone/iPod apps that do all the work for you, it wasn’t so easy to see how current events were seen by other countries . If you wanted to see what India thought of a particular battle in Vietnam, you needed to get your hands on the actual newspaper and read it. For people like myself, it’s hard to imagine what life would have been like back then. I personally didn’t have internet until I was in high school, but it’s so ubiquitous now that imagining a time before you could look something with a search bar isn’t easy.
Specifically he maintained this collection of newspapers so students would be able to come to his house, go out to the garage and look up the Indian perspective on a topic before they wrote their Masters or Doctoral thesis.
Our connection with the Times goes beyond the newspapers in John’s garage as well. The Times of India would send a boat all the way from India to Victoria, where it would buy all the off cuts from the rolls of paper once per year when the paper was cheap and ship the paper back to India for printing.
You can see from the photos we had a lot of paper to recycle and the kind people at Recycling Alternative were able to give us hand with that – we wish we could have donated them in some way, but in this era of Kindles and http://www.audible.com and iPhone/iPod apps, it wasn’t to be.
It was a great job to do, and really fun to work with a great client.
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