The Book in the Age of Facebook:The Game of Reading in Twenty-first Century

( A talk given at senior school students of  Nalanda International School, Vadodara on 9 July 2010)

Let’s start inauspiciously by giving a thought to some common ominous rumours regarding the future of the book and art of reading.We have been told that the art of reading and the book are either on their way out or they are dead already. People don’t read books these days. They watch the TV and surf the Net. For a change they go to watch movies. Books don’t figure much in their lives. Whatever they read is because they are compelled to read by the schools and colleges. They read nothing on their own.

Nothing can be far from truth.

In fact people buy more books than before and book publication and sales is a significant commercial activity. Apart from the fact that academic books are a big industry today, popular writers like JK Rowling, Stephanie Myer or Sidney Sheldon are millionaires and celebrities. Self-help books like the Chicken Soup series, or by Shiva Khera or Stephen Covey are extremely popular. Cook books, books on health and well-being, books on New Age spirituality are extremely popular. Books related to computers, management and finance are greatly in demand.

Just look at the underbelly or the underworld of publishing industry: piracy. In every metropolis in India today, we find street hawkers who sell pirated books. The books mentioned above, the bestsellers are out there on the footpath and youngsters buy and probably even read these books.

I remember when I was pursing my post-graduate studies in Baroda in the mid nineties, when you guys had just come into this world, I ran into the pirated books on such footpaths. Some of the popular books in those times were the book’s like Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964), Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave (1980) and Future Shock(1970), and David Reuben’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, But were Afraid to Ask (1969). The books, I must confess, have left a deep imprint on my thinking. The fascination for Toffler and Transactional Analysis has not yet died down, even after fifteen years. When I find these are the books on the streets in pirated version today, I reassure myself that I haven’t grown very old yet.

The thing is, we read for various purposes. We usually read to obtain information and knowledge, and we read to satisfy our fantasizes and escape boredom. We read for entertainment. We also read out of curiosity. 

The real problem with people who complain that youngsters don’t read is that youngsters don’t read what they want them to read. Youngsters don’t read Jane Austen or Shakespeare or Keats. They don’t read the classics. They read pulp and popular. They read Harry Potter, graphic novels and Twilight Saga. They fantasize about invisibility cloaks and dating a vampire. They read about secret identities and alter egos of the superheroes. School youngsters cannot identify with the world in the books they are taught in their usual literature courses.

One should realize that elders complaining about youth are merely engaging in an age old pastime, a game rather, in Eric Berne’s sense in his book Games People Play. To be more specific, it’s the game called ` Aint it Awful’. I refuse to participate in this grown up’s game of complaining. I will point out that the respected elders and teachers too have had their share of pulp and popular. Remember, Mills and Boons? Nancy Drew? Hardy Boys? Famous Five? Three Investigators? Comics? The popular stuff that we lapped up? I wonder if kids read it these days too.

Reading, unlike, television or films, involves a great amount of active imagination and participation.  This is where its strength lies. We are no longer spectators; we become players in the game of reading. Unlike field sports or computer games, the game of reading takes place in solitude and within us. Reading is the adventure sport that is played inside our minds. For people who love to read are often people who like solitude.

Unlike TV or films or computer games, when a character or situation is described in the book, we create it in our minds and we do it in our own way. When we do it our way, who we are plays a great role in it. The heroes and villains become our heroes and villains, the heroes and villains within us, which are part of us. Reading brings out the hidden parts of our personality into play. We are implicated in the game and it is us who are at stake. We discover our own thoughts, ideas and imagination, we invent our own thoughts and imagination- we discover and invent ourselves.

Hence, the game of reading will never disappear.

As we grow up, the intention behind reading changes. We want something more than entertainment or information or satisfaction of fantasies. We are dealing with issues which cannot be solved by imagining invisibility cloaks and clandestine affairs with vampires.  We read to search for the meaning of our life. We look for the books which help us understand our relationships with others and ourselves. We read to find out why people are the way they are and why we are the way we are.

As we grow up playing the same game, we tend to increase the difficulty level of that game.

Some of us learn to participate in more risky games of reading. Some of us, not all, graduate to `difficult’ books, the ones dealing with very abstract and complex ideas.  the  novels which are very experimental as they avoid the popular ways of story telling, poetry which makes no `sense’ at all because poetry does not make ` sense’ the way newspaper article makes sense or a text book makes sense. The difficult books are difficult because they demand more involvement, imagination, intelligence and concentration than Harry Potter or Twilight. They also challenge who we are. In this challenge, in this solitude, the books reveal who we are to ourselves. This is probably one of the biggest rewards of reading.

The reason why not many people read such books is because not many people care about such things or want to take up challenges and risks of confronting themselves .Such books can cause discomfort and make you feel sad. Not many people raise the difficulty level of the game they have been playing. They either give up the game or continue playing it at entry level.

I am here to coax you to raise the difficulty level of your reading because, as you know, more difficult a game is more fun it becomes. You don’t want to play today the same games you played in your kindergarten. The fun that you get out of a game is directly proportional to the challenge it poses. Same applies to the adventure sports of ideas and imagination, which the books are. All new games may be boring in the beginning but as you learn them, they turn out to be addictive.

I will end my talk with a short list of suggested reading. They are simply my personal favorites.You might have heard of them. Thankfully, you won’t be examined on these books, so that you can play around with them and even forget about them.  I will mention their difficulty level too. Feel free to choose!

I) Difficulty level: Easy to Difficult

            Short Stories of RK Narayan

Short Stories of Anton Chekhov

            Short stories of O Henry  

TS Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

           

II) Difficulty Level: Difficult to Very Difficult

           

Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

            JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye

            Short Stories of JD Salinger

            Short Stories of Franz Kafka

            Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan and Eddie

            Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold

            Poems of WH Auden and WB Yeats

            Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

            Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller

III)  Very Difficult -But who is scared?

            Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges

            Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

            Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch

            James Joyce: Ulysses

`           James Joyce: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

            James Joyce: Dubliners

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

            Poems of TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Arun Kolatkar

 IV) For the Bravest of the Brave

            James Joyce: Finnegans Wake

TS Eliot and Neo Ravi Kiran Mandal

On Friday, 10th Oct., yours faithfully was invited to deliver a lecture on `Contemporary Marathi Poetry' in the Dept of Marathi. The thing is I am not a very good speaker when it comes to delivering a lecture in Marathi. I spoke about what we mean by contemporary poetry in the first place. I said that the term `contemporary' is theoretically a problematicterm, especially after Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time no longer can be considered as something absolute and homogeneous. Therefore, idea of some `standard' time which can be treated as an absolute frame of reference is no longer meaningful. Hence, the term `contemporary' (`contemporary to whom’) looses its force. Times flows with different speed in say for instance a village and a city. The recent quarrel in contemporary Marathi scenario can be traced to different perception of time ( in a village, a town and a city) and in attempts to prove that one's own sense of time is absolute and other's sense of time is `inauthentic'.

I added that by contemporary poetry I mean poetry written in contemporary language, from a contemporary perspective, taking one's own life and society as the context and as a frame of reference. Even if one is dealing with `timeless' subjects like God or Death, the poet is writing in the context of his society and life. I gave the example of Varjesh Solanki's poem `Icon' which is addressed to God as an example of a contemporary poetry. I read Hemant's ` Shopping at a Mega Mall' and Saleel's ` Dharan' ( The Dam) as examples of contemporary Marathi poetry.

The question and answer sessions had the usual questions ( obviously from the teachers) regarding the poetry of Abhidhanantar circle ( if at all there is something like it) being by and for the elite, being insensitive and all that. I responded saying that poetry, at least creative and serious poetry, is not written ` for' or by keeping a particular class in mind. Then this poetry was labeled as ` new Ravi Kiran Mandal' . The questioners had absolutely no idea of the creative process involved in writing poetry. If teachers of literature and some of the so called poet-critics themselves are so abysmally ignorant of this basic process, what can you expect from others?

When you are doing something new and groundbreaking you have to prepare yourself for all sorts of idiotic responses. Unfortunately in Maharashtra as probably in other places, you are also supposed to educate your readers about what you are doing. This is not plain illiteracy. In fact, it is ignorance of people who are supposed to know and the ignorance of those people whom society thinks they know.

So a caveat from TS Eliot is useful here: take no critic seriously who has not written a significant work himself. The reason he knows nothing about how poems are written. Besides, it is not the duty of the writer to educate the uneducated literates. A writer cannot afford to go around curing people of their stupidity. Let us leave these `honourable men and women' to their fates. Pound said that even if you get thirty readers for your poems, you have done your job. He meant the real readers of course and even if your poetry is read by more than three hundred people, expecting thirty intelligent readers seems to be too much to expect.