If reading the newspaper with a steaming cup of coffee is still a routine for many, solving crosswords – that daily fixture in most newspapers – seems to be a fast vanishing hobby, especially among the youth.
Coming to the rescue of crosswords are apps, bringing them to your mobile phones. Indic Crosswords, an app for crosswords in Indian languages started over a year ago, recently started services in Kannada, offering a crossword a day for free. Gautam Chandra, a Telugu-speaking techie presently based out of South Korea, had always been a crossword aficionado. This was disrupted once he moved abroad as crosswords in his native tongue were not available. “To fill this gap, which I was sure many others staying abroad also felt, I started an app publishing a crossword everyday and soon expanded it to Tamil as well. The response was so good that I have now started publishing crosswords in Kannada as well,” Mr. Chandra told The Hindu.
Indic Crosswords has now tied up with noted Kannada crossword writer A.N. Prahlad Rao, who has begun publishing a 7X7 crossword on the app daily. “Sadly, solving crosswords is a vanishing habit. Earlier, elders and women at home used to regularly solve them, while children were prescribed to do so to improve their language. But nowadays, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hope that taking crosswords to mobile phones will encourage the youth,” he hoped.
While the app will publish a crossword everyday for free, Mr. Chandra said he plans to introduce a gallery of over 500 crosswords which one can subscribe to and solve.