Readers, killers, and the extended queue of writers

Try and imagine a killer sitting on a bench at some railway station waiting for his victim to come. Not many will visualize this killer holding a book up and reading. Many will imagine furtive and restless glances, twitching fingers, uneasy shifting of the body, cold and disinterested eyes, and so on. The point I’m making here is that we want killers to be obvious in our imagination and cannot imagine them doing anything else. Even detectives watch for such trails when they go through hours of CCTV coverage while investigating a crime. If a killer or any other person with crime on his mind casually opens a book and begins reading, the job of detectives would become far more difficult. Fortunately, killers and criminals aren’t always readers.

I guess I have successfully led you all to believe that reading has at least one other function besides all those advantages that you already know about. Reading helps hide the real you.

Sounds sinister?

Maybe. But the truth is that the moment you’re one with the plot and conversing with the characters in a story, the you within you stops fumbling and bumbling around. You have expertly hidden yourself and transform into an indecipherable code for anyone observing you. What I am trying to tell readers of this post is that becoming incognito is quite the opposite of what most of us want to be in these times of social media blitz moments. This is why we don’t get to see people reading books under trees in parks and gardens, or any other place including libraries and cafes. The reason is that people today don’t need books to help them hide their reality… they have smartphones. Selfies clicked on smartphones are fast creating a new completely phony world for us all… the kind that books attempted but miserably failed. This new brand of falsity is colourful, creative, modifiable, pliable, and doesn’t insist on ingesting all our time. The speed with which a new false self can be projected to strangers all over the world leaves us all with enough time to goof around. This new found epidemic to hop and skip through time doing nothing has definitely left the world very few dedicated readers… though we have millions clicking pictures with books!

Yes, we certainly have fewer real readers today. But we do have a social media where books and reading reign. Seems fine to me.

What about writers in India?

If Ruskin Bond has deciphered a growing tribe of writers there must be some truth in it. India published 90,000 titles in 2013 with 24% of them in English and 26% in Hindi. The tribe of self-publishing authors grew world-wide at a rate of more than 28 percent in 2017. Statistically we are among the top 3 book publishing nations in Asia and the Middle East and in the top 10 globally. According to Beat Barblan, Director of Identifier Services at Bowker, ‘Self-publishing shows no signs of slowing down and continues to grow at a steady rate.’ With KDP around, this trend isn’t set to decline. So yes, we, as a nation, are serious about writing which isn’t strange as even the literacy figures released by the government will tell us. My logic is simple: Where is the point in being literate if I cannot publish even one book in my lifetime? I’m not quoting literacy figures and stats about the speed with which our universities are churning out doctorates because I don’t want readers of this article to rush out of their homes shouting, ‘The deluge is coming! We’re soon going to drown in books!’

If you’re already staring at your screen in alarm, allow me to add to your anxiety by saying that our population grew from 133.92 crore in 2017 to 135.43 crore in the most recent census. Now imagine the way our literacy figures are poised to soar… and, of course, the number of books that will be published.

There are many who see disaster in too many books being written but too few readers who take reading seriously. Well, I don’t see any anomaly here. I asked an astrologer friend about this and he predictably drew a few complex lines and wrote some words that made me feel I was in an astronomy class, and then after a while he looked up and said, ‘You see, every book is born with its set of readers already decided by the stars. No book vanishes into eternity before its task is completed.’

This seems like a rather healthy caption for books – I thought, though there may be incidents where a book finally finds its readers after the author has decided to call it a day. Quite an encouraging statement by that astrologer. We need him to go and convince Ruskin Bond, I think.

There is one facet about published books that alarms me. I’ve been sent hundreds of books and have actually read only a handful of them. Why? The reason why most have been left unread is that the first few minutes spent with them were utterly uninspiring… for me, let me hurriedly add. For some time let us classify one segment of what gets published in India as #IDontLikeThisBook. Who would read it? Let me tell you about a meeting with a beauty blogger that gave me the answer to this question. I once pointed to a lipstick that had a dark and satanic shade to a beauty blogger and asked, ‘Who buys them?’ She looked surprised and answered, ‘There are minds that love dark and satanic moments and they come and buy them. Simple. Every shade has a mindset that is somewhere out there searching and they meet when the time is right.’ She sounded as insightful as that astrologer because I had found my answer. There are readers with habits and tastes that must match the stuff that a book contains… and when they meet, a reader for that book has arrived!

Well, the world will never have #MoreWritersThanReaders because God has created an infinite number of mindsets that are, even at this moment, moving surely towards that book that has been written for them.

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Arvind Passey
15 May 2019