How I set my first crossword

DH journalist Anand Singh meets a crossword-setting expert, and discovers that the job is for perfectionists who get every little thing right

DH journalist sets his first crossword. 

For years, I spied commuters on Mumbai’s local trains labouring on crossword puzzles. I would see them bent over, their faces tense and intrigued, trying to get a word right before they reached their station. This was my first memory of the grid puzzles.

I was daunted by the idea of crosswords and wondered how one could spend hours grappling with cryptic clues. I wasn’t a big reader and had a shallow pool of information to draw my words from. Crossword clues come from diverse fields, and vast general knowledge is essential if you want to crack them. When I tried my hand at it, I realised they played with words I was unfamiliar with. I ended up looking up the dictionary, and the encyclopaedias. And that put me off.

In university, I had a friend devoted to crosswords. She scrawled all over the newspapers in the college library, trying to solve crosswords. “Looks boring!” I once said to her, to which she replied, “Nothing beats the thrill of completing a crossword, Anand. Have you ever tried the Telegraph Toughie?” I was further intrigued, but fear of failure prevented me from ever trying to complete a crossword.

Four years later, I started working as a journalist with Deccan Herald. It has a daily crossword which appears on the very page I edit. On weekends, we have two separate ones — one for adults and another for children (on different pages). So, one fine day, I decided to tackle the one meant for adults. When I started, I made it a point not to look at the answer key. Across first? Or down? I was at a loss how to begin. It took me an hour and a half, but I stumbled my way through it, and cracked it. Elated, I could relate to what my friend had told me.

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I was soon hooked. I went down a rabbit hole online. Each time one completes a crossword puzzle, one learns something new. I wasn’t just solving crosswords but reading about them when I came across the word ‘cruciverbalist’. It means ‘a person who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords’. I wondered if there were cruciverbalists in Bengaluru. Turns out this tribe is strong and thriving, not just in the city
but across the country.

I dialled Chittaranjan Andrade, psychiatrist at Nimhans, who has been setting crosswords for DH’s weekend edition for years.

I sought a meeting with him, and asked if he could teach me how to set a crossword. I had solved a few simple crosswords, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to set one. We sat down at his office and I began setting my first puzzle. He suggested a 10x10 grid.

I learned that we don’t just slap black squares down randomly, but instead adhere to a symmetry. “Like poetry has metre, crosswords have symmetry,” he said. Intricate planning is required to determine the best locations for the black blocks. The grids are bilaterally symmetrical, I was told, and I noticed, for the first time, motifs on a crossword. After two hours of working on the grid, I had set a basic crossword puzzle.

We have software from which we can pick grid templates, but we went the manual way. As I typed each word into the grid, we realised we had shared interests like cheese, wine, and fitness.

The clues I set were straightforward. I was acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of puzzle construction, and I had to spend time to be able to hone my craft. In due course, I got in touch with more crossword enthusiasts in town.

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Col Deepak Gopinath (retd) is a well-known name in the tightly-knit community. He has been a champion crossword solver for decades. Why crossword solvers are such a niche community, I wondered. “Crosswords appearing in Indian newspapers and magazines are mostly borrowed from international publications. They seem difficult for people just starting out. If we had more crosswords with the local context, I think it could pique more people’s interest,” he said.

Another well-known name in the crossword circuit is Kushagra Singh, based in Patna. He is the organiser of the Indian Crossword League, which he founded in 2013. “Even if one is able to solve 70% of crosswords, about 30% of the clues are still from the country these come from, and are not easy to guess,” he told me.

By his reckoning, only 5,000 to 6,000, in a country of 121 crore (2011 census), regularly solve crosswords. “It is possible that more people are involved, but they prefer to keep it a quiet hobby,” he says. But the interest is growing. “The community was significantly smaller a decade ago. More and more
people are participating in competitions thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated groups,” Gopinath said.

A reason for the lukewarm uptake is that young people are glued to their smartphones and don’t pick up a pen and paper, he observed. I agreed. Young people don’t even bother with a lengthy photo caption on social media, I muttered to myself.

Mental acuity

But, Gopinath said, you need way less time to crack a crossword than to read a book. “Solving a crossword definitely prevents mental deterioration. It keeps one’s neural pathways open. It helps develop a better vocabulary and is a good workout for the brain in the morning,” he said.

According to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), cracking crossword puzzles is a great way to sharpen analytical skills in preparation for competitive exams, Singh said.

Building a community

For a decade, Singh has invested time and effort in organising the Indian Crossword League. This is a tournament and gets about 2,000 entries every year.

“The best approach to build the community was to stimulate the curiosity of schoolchildren. For five years, we collaborated with the CBSE to host competitions for grades 8 through 12. These students later went on to participate in the Indian Crossword League. Then we decided to involve kids of all ages by hosting something on the lines of ‘a clue a day’ rather than giving them a full crossword puzzle. As an incentive, we offered a reward,” he said.

He soon noticed even students of Class 3 were giving crosswords a shot. A community sprang up, with members ranging from 10-year-olds to nonagenarians.

Setting the puzzle

This is not just a community that loves solving crosswords but also enjoys setting them. The puzzles appear on blogs, and in newsletters, newspapers and magazines. While I now see how solving a riddle might be satisfying, I couldn’t still understand why anyone would spend time setting crosswords. There is no glory in it: many publications don’t even acknowledge who set their crosswords.

Disha Verma, a crossword aficionado, recently started setting crosswords for her newsletter. “I do this on a small scale, and I know about 10-15 people are going to solve my puzzles. It is great to get feedback from them. As soon as the newsletter is released, people start sending me messages. Sometimes they share photos to show how they are battling with the clues,” she says. In bigger publications, “the process is more impersonal”.

Disha likes to keep it a bit more complex when she sets clues. “For example, if the word is ‘antenna’, I wouldn’t write a literal clue, say, ‘signal receptor’. I would rather use a cryptic one, like ‘bug detector’. I need to strike a balance with pop culture as well because I know who my audience is and what they would enjoy,” she said.

At the league

On Christmas, in Bengaluru, I got a chance to attend one of the biggest crossword competitions in the country, The Indian Crossword League, that is.

Attendees included cruciverbalists and aficionados from across India. High school children and septuagenarians sat together cracking crosswords on stage. I sat in the audience, watching how quickly they could crack the clues. They would also explain the more
obscure clues.

The hints came from Italian language, French cinema and ancient Indian history, and I wondered how one could become so well read and knowledgeable. And I was
flabbergasted by how quickly some figured out the clues. The audience was allowed to participate, and I sat there with pen and paper, failing miserably.

Anjum, who also sat in the audience, and I struck up a conversation. She appeared to be in her seventies and looked thrilled to be there. She whispered the answers, mostly correct, and asked me if I knew them. It was embarrassing because I had no idea. I tried to change the topic. “What happens if a hint is incorrect or a word is misspelt?” She put down her pen and said, “There is no room for error in a community like this. Mistakes are unacceptable because they waste people’s time. This is a purist community. That is why we have crossword editors in publications like The New York Times and The Guardian, paid handsomely, just like other editors.”

Perfectionists dominate the community. Disha, though, did mention that she had found a couple of errors in an Indian publication. Nasty letters might land in the editor’s inbox under such circumstances, she said. I made small inroads into the community and spent a month trying to understand how crossword setting works. The anxiety that I won’t crack a toughie lingers, but I guess if I go across first and then down, I won’t be too lost.