Needed, a winter break for the bookworm
As Reading Week kicks off in Kerala, Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Malayalam writer E Santoshkumar has a bit of gentle advice: seek a book that will provide you with real warmth.
FollowJune 19 marks the beginning of Reading Week in Kerala. Every year all the libraries, schools, colleges and similar institutions organize week-long celebrations heralding the benefits that reading would bring, from equipping you with immense knowledge to stimulating your analytical capabilities and from reducing stress and strain to even halting the Alzheimer's that is waiting for all of us in silence.
The booksellers, for obvious reasons, will join this bandwagon by offering massive discounts -- buy one, get one free -- suggesting must-reads from their endless lists. Writers and public figures will be invited to give motivational speeches advising the young generation to start reading forthwith and older folks to continue the process ignoring their fading eyesight. This seven-day ritual finally ends, generating so much noise, like all such rituals generally do.
A few years back, cartoonist V R Ragesh made fun of this short-term reading spree in a few strokes. A happy family was religiously performing their duty during one such reading session by opening big volumes (including a telephone directory, which was in vogue those days).
The wife regrets: 'Last year, I happened to read a lot even beyond the reading week without knowing the fact that it got over.'
The husband provides an instant solution: "This year, we have kept an alarm clock (to wake them up from reading)!"
Jokes apart, it is not the lack of reading that worries me now. In fact, the millennials read a lot. From Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook and a countless number of online sources they read. They read all the stuff on their cell phones and tablets. I have seen many of them, in the solitude of their own worlds, reading relentlessly anywhere, everywhere, all the time. But what are they reading, or what is this stuff they are so passionate about? It is hard to guess.
Another place, another time. But not a very distant past. This is a strange case of a bibliophile or not that strange a case perhaps, he buys all the books he could lay his hands on, from bookshops, streets, from the book vendor who comes visiting occasionally to the office he works or trains and buses when he travels. He buys books from all of them. Being a techie, he can use a kindle too. So up-to-date he is that the very moment an award is announced, the book is on his lap. Plus a humongous amount of pirated material on an off the line.
Collecting all these material, he just leafs through them, and his interest fades soon, as, on the next day, the news of a new book launch arrives, a new award is announced, or the passing away of a writer is heard. He walks from book stores to book stores. No wonder his house is full of books. A mountain of unread or half-read volumes is waiting for his courteous attention on his table. Every day the 'soulful mountain' gains more height, more weight.
Are you like him, consuming more books than are necessary? But then, how much is too much? The real question is, where do these wanderings eventually lead one to?
I don't think these people will enjoy books; they will not be able to live in them. They are pilgrims to many a temple, but not devotees. Like in the fables of rich men amassing all the wealth in the world but live and die like beggars, these curio collectors also attempt to take possession of everything. But inside, they remain literal illiterates. They eat but do not relish. The love is skin-deep or jacket-deep since we are speaking about books. Finally, one ends up a dilettante of different tastes -- a jack of many topics.
It is a fact that you cannot read all the books that are being published or, for that matter, even that are being awarded. Books are like people, and you cannot befriend all of them.
We have come a long way from information scarcity to a deluge of information. All are inundated with books, magazines, podcasts, book talks, shows, and whatnot. Gone are the days when people needed to go to a library, waiting for months to get a book of their choice. Nowadays, it is all at our fingertips. The tragedy is that we really lose control of our attention, and the all-pervading algorithms set the agenda for our lives, including reading. Your finger presses exactly where the algorithm commands.
So stepping a little bit out of the daily cacophony will have a soothing effect. The gentle advice from a wannabe minimalist during this reading festival would be: please stay away from the surge of these tomes. You will feel an inner calm as never before. A hibernation of sorts. After that winter, you will seek a book that will provide you with real warmth. You will be focused. Caring. Isn't that enough? After all, life, as they say, is too short.
