The Culture of Reading

Where’s the launch tonight? - The Hindu 

Earnest Hemingway once said "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you."

But sadly virtues of a good read seem missing today in most developing economies. Economic pursuits have completely hijacked the minds of these disdained. Whilst one maybe materialistically rich but falls frought intellectually. The very foundation of a civil society is a knowledge based society and a knowledge based society is formed by a well read society.

A society without humanity is a soulless entity. How can we inculcate humanity when people shy away from reading.

Interestingly I gave my students an assignment to comment and state their thoughts on a speech given by Frantz Fanon on "Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom". I wasn't surprised when one of my student actually said that the entire speech sounded Greek to him both the language as well as its content. When I ask the same student what was the latest book he read, and he quipped, a management text book that he was forced to read to prepare for his examination last semester. Any other book I asked and he said never in the last 7 years. Ironically most of his classmates echoed the same sentiment.

They have never heard of Hemingway nor Dan Brown. JK Rowlings, yes but they watched the movie instead.

Technology is often faulted for this predicament, but I beg to disagree. Technology is merely a tool to facilitate life. So reading need not be conventional but it can be digital as well. This reminds me to an old saying, " You can lead a horse to the water, but you can't make it to drink."  Only if there is a thirst for knowledge the reading culture can flourish, otherwise the use of extraneous forces would be futile.

Whether it is science or spirituality the attitude of the mind called "scientific temper" is essential in human progression. It is not about a singular subject as History, Geography, Mathematics or Biology but it is a whole spectrum of thoughts that culminates from curiosity.

Einstein aptly put it. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."

Getting people in particular the younger ones to appreciate reading has become a personal quest to many passionate knowledge facilitators.

I would like to share a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, "Where The Mind Is Without Fear."

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

 

This poem was written during the struggles of independence in India, it shows how knowledge can help to shape the destiny of a nation. The power of knowledge via reading has become even more relevant today in a globalized citizenry.