What if I were a drop of water on a planet where there was just water and nothing else. No birds flying in the air, no fish testing the under-current, no micro-organisms waiting for their turn to die and get reborn as a human. Just water everywhere and I, a little drop bobbing up and down with zillions of other droplets shouting, ‘I am a water droplet. Drink me.’ But there will be no one to pull me out with cupped hands and look at me with elation… no one to pull out a camera and click my picture as I jump up and dance in the air.
What if I were a writer on a planet where everyone wrote and no one ever read anything? Why will I then want to navigate through hordes of thoughts and ideas jostling to seek my attention and be a part of the creative music that writing is? What will I do then?
You think this is just a dark thought and untrue? Well, just look around and you’ll see a world where book shops are closing down, ebooks are struggling to reach their readers, and even tweets and social media updates bounce on each other so fast that they get buried faster than they are born. Timelines on social media platforms are accelerating and updates look like a blur. Trying to stop this blur to read and you’ll be in the black hole of unread notifications.
I put a brake on my timeline to see what these updates were about and was surprised to see how terribly similar to each other they were. They were all either trying to sell whatever they have written and published (this includes blog posts, not just books and ebooks) or attempting to prove to sponsors to include them in their list for invites and freebies. ‘I am the best’ happens to be a common refrain all around… and if this is all I get to read, I thought I might as well throw in my ‘I am better than you’ updates. But is anyone really reading?
‘Is anyone reading?’ – isn’t the right question. We should be asking, ‘Have I written something that is worth reading and different from all this?’ People have stopped reading because there is hardly anything to read now… as Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451: ‘The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.’ Writing or churning out updates and blog posts and even novels has infected us all… and because we are now reading less and less, there are books everywhere with no one reading them.
Kindles are over-loaded, couriers are running around delivering books bought at a discount, book-shelves at home are over-flowing with books, social media updates have photographs clicked with books around, behind, and in a person’s lap… but who is really reading? We are all writing. Writing easy and forgettable prose… probably because we don’t even know that ‘a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,’ as Thomas Mann wrote in ‘Essays of Three Decades’. Yes, there are a few who are reading and also reviewing… but they are numbered. There are those who are reading for pleasure… but they are numbered.
The readers are fast being out-numbered by the writers. Most will be writing mundane prose with tired and exhausted words trudging up to join sentences. No, it hasn’t happened yet but the day isn’t far when we shall be navigating our way through books and the written word without reading anything.
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This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
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Arvind Passey
11 February 2016