Letters, space and content

I am amused by the brouhaha triggered by the mysterious writer who wrote of an alleged "hogging" of space by some and the subsequent ton of bricks that fell on him.

According to Parkinson's First Law, work is supposed to expand to occupy the time available. I am not aware of any expansion of letters edited by the staff to fill the space available, but some letters do seem to have been (badly) truncated and abbreviated to fit the space.

By and large, I sense that the quality of the letters published in "Your Letters" tends to be inversely proportional to the space available on that particular day. On a sepi (quiet) day a lot of meaningless letters seem to appear while as on a ramai (hectic) one, meaningful letters seem to fight for space.

K.B. KALE

Jakarta