Young India Is Biting The ‘Reading’ Bait

Here’s something to cheer Indians about. While we continue to read more and more about how the country isn’t doing things right or how problems in the country are gaining mammoth proportions; there’s good news about the youth of the nation.

Just as rest of the world is worried silly over diminishing number of book publications, the numbers are on a rise in this country, which is still grappling with literacy rates.

Publishing industry in India is a thriving business now, given the fact that most urban writers prefer to write in English and there’s a huge readership too. Native writers who take to their mother tongue do enjoy having a considerable size of population read their works.

Increased reading habits could also be an off-shoot of improved and new businesses that have made accessing books an easy task. Add to this the new and wide variety of books that are hitting the market which weren’t available earlier. Topics like general reading, business management, personality development and mid-path spirituality books that lean towards making the day-to-day modern living a cake walk…so on and so forth.

But, what’s equally appalling about this trend is reading habits today are greatly altered by technology and this problem has already arrived in India, as much as it has been prevalent in western nations.

Right now, India is enjoying its celebration time of having drawn the young and old alike, back into the folds of reading as a habit. Young India is biting the book bait. But, when online privacy is a matter of huge concern today, should we not take steps to ensure this matter is taken care of before time runs out?

According to a readership survey that was conducted a few years ago, a heartening picture had emerged with equally disheartening fact. While more than 75% of the youth of the surveyed areas were educated or literate to say the least, only 25% of them had taken to ‘actual’ reading.

Declining trend in reading for any nation is almost equivalent to a death knell. This means, the youth who are going to be tomorrow’s responsible citizens, are going to be in darkness over matters pertaining to their lives, and nation’s safety. Pro-reading activists are crying hoarse. But, is anyone listening?

Internet today is the biggest driver of ‘reading’ per se. Majority of urban youth accesses their share of reading, mostly through websites and links that are posted on social networking sites. On one hand it would mean, they are reading topics that they wouldn’t usually read otherwise.

But, on the other, it also means they are turning in restless and listless readers who don’t spend more than a few minutes on each topic. This newfound habit is impacting their offline reading persona too.

Internet has been a great force that has changed the way we have been living so far. The past almost seems like unbelievable when imagined without the power of technology. But, in more ways than one, it may also turn into our own doom for the reason that Internet also has more capacity to wield opinions by way of infringing privacy and altering habits that existed in its absence.

How does it impact? When one reads a write up that’s possibly moderately written in a size that fits a single scroll without losing the last para, the human mind would possibly expect the same format to exist in conventional medium too. For instance, a single scroll reading demands may be, a few minutes of each person’s time -- on the go – mostly. To expect the same equation to exist with a subject of deeper perspective or focus, and losing the span of attention while attempting to read can do serious damage to the human mind.

Now, given this as a fact, to think of our future generation of researchers who will work on something single-mindedly would be an aberration. In that case, how can a country even dream of progress, unless it comes in a single scroll?