I love the cryptic crosswords from The Hindu.
I started trying to solve crosswords in The Hindu sometime during my schooling – 9th / 10th. No one taught me how to crack them. So most of the days, I would put consecutive editions of newspaper and try to figure out how to solve. Then forgot about them till12th. Picked it up again during my Engineering, this time around, the smarties in my wing would have solved most of the crossword before I even pick up the paper. I remember filling the full crossword, all by myself, without cheating, all of 3 times.
I still try to solve crosswords but it is now mostly the quick crossword in Hindustan Times. Unlike, the Hindu, this is a copy of the Times from London, so most of the times, you need to know geography, literature, slang etc., of England.
But to the point of this blog, most of my attempts at crossword solving are brute force. I know very few techniques or tricks of solving. So the next few posts are going to be techniques of solving crosswords in the top newspapers from India.
Its content is not going to be mine. I will cut-paste from old blogs which are not active and give credit where due.
