Pay to read your own book for two hours!

After the session

I have plenty of time to read, said no one ever. And now, more than ever, there is little time to read with arguments on social media, videos about things we already know, panda videos and TV soaps.

Some of the participants discussed the books they were reading

To take us away from this list of endless distractions, one needs a little bit of pressure. That pressure can even be that of commitment made to oneself but something that others are aware of, feels Sandeep Malhotra, who co-started the movement Reading Social with Rashmi Baruah.

The venue was arranged with easy reading lights, crumpling languorous sacks, sofas, chairs and tables.

The initiative is a series of sessions where you pay an amount (Rs 500 for this session) to meet at a venue (bars and restaurants till now) and read uninterrupted for two hours, while sipping drinks and munching on food provided by the organisers. "We can allocate two hours at home too but then when we make an effort to go to a place and are in an environment when others are reading, too, we stop ourselves from being distracted," Agarwal says.

So on a glum Sunday morning, when the clouds engulfed the city sky again in a monsoon that has overstayed to our annoyance, we picked up the slim paperback, The Haunted Life: The Lost Novella by Jack Kerouac, that has been lying around, only to be shifted from place to place with a few pages turned at a time.

The venue, antiSocial, an enormous antechamber of the hip Social restaurant at Khar was turned into a den for the readers. With easy reading lights, crumpling languorous sacks, sofas, chairs and tables. We asked for Panini Sandwich and coffee and started with the novella, the manuscript of which, Kerouac had lost in a hotel room. And the pages raced on, with the much-appreciated beats of the gifted writer's prose.

Time passed by. No one gave a damn. Someone spilled a bit of coffee. No one cared. (Except, of course, some staff from the restaurant doubly careful to tidy up things in silence).

The story was unfolding; a fascinating world of American uncles who seem to be predecessors of Donald Trump, the romantics, the realists all come to life with the thought that this perhaps could have had another draft or perhaps more marination of thoughts, whatever worked for him.

Then there was a gentle music announcing the end of the session. Faces around seemed pleased, either for being able to keep promise to self or by the skills of the author they were reading. Co-founder Baruah concluded the event, saying that the session was now officially over but the readers can interact with each other if they wished.

We joined a postmortem with the three readers, a lawyer, a writer and a student. The primary demand was to have more interaction. "That would have been useful as we can get to know what others are reading and in the process enrich our own lists," says Balkha, a writer, who came to know about the event through social media.

Malhotra says that people can interact with each other after the session but they do not want to be a facilitator. "We do not want this to become another book club as many such clubs already exist. The idea here is to encourage more people to find time for reading," he says.

The other lament that Malhotra can't do much about, is the dwindling number of local libraries, with usually nominal costs and geriatric librarians, who shush you into silence, and with judgmental looks bring distracted readers back to their books.

Log on to: www.thereadingsocial.com