23 January,2011 09:29 AM IST | | Abhijit Majumder
Bibliophobia. The fear of books. One of India's largest untreated, unattended epidemics. While journalists and gentry come back from the Jaipur Literature Festival with stories of rubbing shoulders with Orhan Pamuk or William Dalrymple, most educated Indians had last read a grim, hostile textbook before making their escape to the cosy, highly rewarding world of balance sheets and annual reports. Storybooks, of course, had long been safely locked away in childhood's vault.
People who sell books in India say that the business has seen single-digit, marginal growth (not really encouraging, since our population is growing more than marginally). This is also dismal, they say, given the number of outlets that have opened in Indian cities lately and the far greater access at least urban Indians now have to books.
In effect, although figures are hard to come by, one assumes that a fewer percentage of Indians are buying and reading books today. That is depressing, as the country's reading population had anyway been a tittle in a tide.
Meanwhile, my friends in the television business say an average Indian watches 120 minutes of television every day. Two hours. Two goddamn hours spent mainly on watching fictional characters get tormented by their in-laws. That is a solid six or seven years of television viewing in a lifetime, and here we are merely talking about the average Indian TV viewer, not the many thousands of rehab cases who stay helplessly sunk in their couches and froth in the mind in the hypnotic, flickering light from the LCD screen. What a full, rich life.
Salinger, Sharatchandra, Neruda obviously don't stand chance.
Why are we so book-averse? Surely, adult conditions will have to be rooted in childhood.
It is tragic that very early on in our lives, storybooks and textbooks get separated, often nastily, involving much screaming, shouting, even a sound thrashing. Cinderallas and Rip Van Winkles are fine, so are Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or the Vampire series (which a Crossword Bookstore spokesperson says is doing quite well among young adults). But as one leaves primary school behind and approaches competition, divorce proceedings from the world of storybooks begins.
The parental and societal brainwash is so harsh and total that at the end of it, millions of us who devoured short stories like cupcakes and novels like a long, colourful ice-candy begin to fear, as adults, even nibbling at the first chapter of a storybook. We are convinced we won't be able to get to the main course, won't be able to enjoy or digest the pages. But our worst fear is that a book will slowly strip us naked of our middle-class aspirations, mundane goals, selfish creature comforts, and then subject us to the whiplash of larger emotions, feelings, sacrifice and new moralities ufffdall that our education had warned us against.
Hornby's About A Boy will tempt you to drop your coolness and learn from a weird, brooding schoolboy, Gordimer's My Son Story will challenge your comfortable disgust of adultery, Bryson will make you guffaw like a maniac on a local train, and Tagore, Ghalib or Neruda will make your world look small, very small.
Reading a book is certainly a dangerous thing. Storybooks, especially, are best kept out of the reach of adults.
Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, Mid Day. Reach him at abhijit@mid-day.com
