Reading – by which I mean reading books, the same way wearing overwhelmingly suggests wearing clothes – is returning to a state it once was towards the beginning: an elite pursuit. I am not a paper pedant. So, by reading, I don’t much differentiate between a physical ‘dead tree’ copy or a Kindle spirit. Although I do believe that the book object is the best gateway drug to reading, whether by turning the page, or by sliding the finger across a screen.
Gutenberg may have ultimately made reading a popular pursuit, even a common one, at the height of the reign of the book. But that was a time when entertainment as well as knowledge-gathering didn’t have prime contenders like cinema and television, both of which in various formats over the years have made book reading twee. Add social media content to the mix, and reading books finds itself standing outside in the rain.
I travel almost every day on the Metro in a city that is still considered – especially by itself – to be bookish. Till date, I have encountered not more than five people reading a book, as opposed to watching/listening a phone. In many other countries, the homo lector – reading (wo)man – on the Metro is still a visible subspecies. Not here in this country. And that, as a member of the upper-middle class with aristocratic posturings, I don’t see it as a bad thing. It makes the book reader increasingly like someone behind the wheel of a Bugatti.
The book has always been a technological marvel. But what makes it stand out from other forms of the written word – reports, articles, messages, etc – itself a more exclusive form of communication than the visual or aural word, is that it requires what the modern common man doesn’t have much of: the luxury of active leisure. Reading is not a passive act like binge-watching a streaming show, for which you just need to keep your eyes and ears open and the content will come to you.
Here, like eating, one has to proactively engage in an activity. Passive consumption is not an option. You have to earn one’s keep by reading. The way there is a difference between a good writer and a bad one, there is a difference between a good reader and a bad one. And as soon as a qualitative element comes into the picture, a pecking order – the warp and woof of elitism – comes into play.At the top rung of this privileged class comes the connoisseur, who indulges in the opulent feast of selective reading. She or he is keen to vaunt and flaunt his reading taste by displaying the book cover – something that the Kindle cannot do – the same way the wearer of a $5,900 Balenciaga hourglass crocodile-effect leather coat would want to ‘subtly’ show off the designer label’s logo.The public library may have wanted to equalise the asymmetry between mass market and the cognoscenti. But we all know the state of public library popularity these days. (The British Council Library, for instance, once also a haunt for lovers and office commuters before returning home, would settle down to soak up the air-conditioning between the bookshelves. That luxury in the tropics has been replaced by the chilled-out mall and the AC becoming more ubiquitous.)
The book is now not just a classy bragging device for being in the knowledge game, but also for possessing refined taste. The very act of reading books, as opposed to an X feed (will people stop saying ‘formerly Twitter’ please) is the equivalent of drinking single malt as opposed to any cold drink. For the non-reader who doesn’t have the time or inclination to feed off the telepathic function of a book – it is essentially mind-reading a person, dead or alive, via pages – he or she is just not swish enough to inculcate the posh habit once aspired by the multitude.
By his or her very existence, the book reader embodies a kind of decadence, a wealth of time, a lack of trivial pursuits, the absence of unavoidable toil. In other words, the reader is the aristocrat of our times.