As far back as I can remember, I’ve always enjoyed bookmarking items just as much as I enjoy reading. Coming back to something after accidentally discovering it always felt like a nice closure of the loop. Back in my school days, kids younger than grade seven weren’t allowed to borrow books from the library. So in order to actually finish reading something, we had to remember the shelf number and the row number for the book and the page number at which we had to pause. But given how little schools trust young kids with books, we weren’t allowed to carry pens or pencils into the library. So at the end of each weekly 45-minute ‘reading period,’ you could notice a few kids exiting the library, softly chanting something like - A17/Row 4/328, i.e. Shelf/Row/Page. And we’d climb two, three floors up to our classrooms and open our notebooks to quickly jot down the chant lest we forget next week. Thankfully, the advent of digital reading has made it much easier to bookmark stuff and I, for one, have an overflowing bookmarks section in my browser. Now, How many times a day do you receive spam calls? A fascinating story about the faults in the telecom regulator’s 15-year-old effort to curb the menace. The demand for contact details has spawned a thriving set of data brokers. Solving the problem will likely require reorienting it to a privacy issue as opposed to one simply about consumer annoyance. It’s been a draining week for me, so my weekend plans are to kick back, dig through some of those bookmarks and hopefully find a fun read or two to relax with. I hope you find these stories bookmark-worthy. We’ll see you again next week with a fresh slate of exciting reads. Till then, take care! Happy Eid Mubarak
