16 Sep 2024 / Shooting the Breeze

Floundering Conveyance to Higher Realms

This lies somewhere between and in-between public lamentation of private angst and that great valve -- a rant. Whatever it may be, it makes a fair point. Sliding towards the obsolete perhaps, but fair nevertheless. Fairly understandable, if not agreeable then, this title. I have always loved the ride, and I rue the slow passing of yet another essential measure of cultivated minds and urbanity – books and readers. There is bias at the core, of course. I grew up in a house with bookshelves. Perfectly at ease with the risk of being dismissed as a relic regrettably surviving a bygone age, I state my point. But background and bias must precede it. A loner type of nature, frequent bouts of illness or injury and a garret room I had all to myself, introduced me to books. They trounced time, space, story and situation to carry me across plots, people, places. With them I entered and participated in vicarious pleasures and make-believe worlds. Oftentimes, real worlds too. They radically opened my mind’s aperture, gifted me sight as I learnt to see the world around me with understanding and detail. They planted the mind’s eye and imagination to see with it…Domains of endless possibilities. Other worlds which first beckoned, then took me by the hand and perched me high. Always a pygmy, I saw far and saw wide from atop shoulders of giants. Books were such a guaranteed feel-good factor. And bookshops with refined booksellers, as well read as they were well spoken. The bookshops themselves were hallowed ground. A visit promised great discovery of unknown knowledge and with this, that purest pleasure – joy of understanding, of finding something out at your pace, first-hand. Of being nudged or shoved to go out into the world and experience, re-discover it if you could. I can run this waffle endlessly, but I cut to the chase after confessing the sin of trashing my father’s collection of Persian poetry after he orbited out. Among the languages he spoke, Persian was one. To me the script and the tongue were alien, therefore, without connection or relevance, a useless bother. Confession leads me understanding context, consequence and calamity of the great libraries of Alexandria, Takshashila, Vikramshila, Nalanda…No comparison, except common pointlessness of mental dwarfs….

Among much else, books are locations of culture, mimetic third spaces so essential to escape welters of madness which are the world. Where do we go in dreams if not to a universal library? Firing synapses crackling in the distance, mythic beings…limitless, but strangely connected. Reading as an unessential, elective habit is almost dead. Reading more than inane, asinine stuff that is. In an age of the ersatz, raucous immediacy and nanosecond attention spans social media and voyeurism set the order. Books have moved to shape and form radically different from ones which afforded opportunities of smelling the printer’s ink, admiring illustrations… delicious luxuries forgotten now. Every age yields to another as it must. The impending demise of books as I knew them and the reading habit as I understood it,has unleashed a new, entirely insufferable crop of duffers and duds. Incapable of most things set in the liberal arts deeper in perspective than one millimetre. A most unfortunate situation. Social media and all its appendages flying off the spindle are set in democracy of information (not knowledge). I always believed that modern government with democracy was deeply dangerous and severely flawed, the model now petrifies me. Democracy thinks the majority is right and must prevail. Look around and gauge the democratic majority. Immediacy of SM and Prof. Google have driven democracy deeper – now everyone knows everything, or s they like to believe. Yet another detonation in my practiced belief that people should be told what they need to know, not what they’d like to know. They cannot sensibly process or use it, that’s why…Always a pestilence, people are now schooled on planet Zog. Worse, they mock those dignified symbols of mind—books. Books now serve as props in TV debates. Everyone has books as backdrop. Leaders line rooms with volumes which have never be opened. Sole purpose | purport: grant gravitas to his/her eminence. Always unrelatable, the world is increasingly unrecognizable. BUT I remain a defender, of the Realm.