The gift of reading

As a human being, you yearn to be understood. To be accepted as you are. Because, many times despite your Herculean efforts, you land yourself in a place far away from where you desire to be, and you end up questioning yourself. Against such a backdrop, you read about someone else’s struggles that feel exactly like yours, and you cannot veer yourself away from those words.

The distance afforded by seeing your own emotions expressed by some stranger, who gets you more than your own family and friends do, makes you suddenly feel at peace with yourself. You feel a visceral connection with that strange writer who might be alive or dead.

A sigh of relief emerges from you, as though you had been holding your breath till then. Even a tear or two might escape your eyes. Feeling empathy for someone else in your shoes, you finally accept yourself.

You feel you are not alone in your weirdness, or weakness, or vulnerability, or fallibility. That you are not abnormal for being put off by Sally Rooney’s highly decorated bestseller ‘Normal People’, and to have ranked the not-so-well-known ‘The Bookseller at the End of the World’ by Ruth Shaw way above that.

You are relieved to find that you are simply, uniquely and beautifully human.

Books can become life savers. True companions till death do us apart. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad times. In happy times and in sad times. They can become your therapist, friend, buddy, philosopher, guide, the significant other, sibling, the relationship-that-is-yet-to-be-named.

Wherever you might have been born, books can take you on rides, adventures, time travels, and on journeys with no imaginary boundaries. Languages, cultures, geographies, time periods — none of these seems a barrier for the written word.

The best thing about good books is that they can slowly and steadily guide you towards the person you wish to become.

But for all these things to happen, you have to invest your time and develop an interest in reading; if possible, right from a very young age. The best gift you can give yourself, or your children, is the habit of reading, not just for knowledge, but also for pleasure, to nurture curiosity, to learn, to heal, to be rejuvenated, or simply to pass time.

If we assume being literate automatically translates into the habit of reading, we are gravely mistaken. While literacy has been growing steadily across our country, currently standing around 81%, the habit of leisure reading has been constantly declining, standing around a mere 4% as of 2024 as per The Time Use Survey (TUS) conducted by the National Statistical Office under the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

The smartphone, which has evolved from a tool to a human appendage, always available for scrolling and equipped with the short video addictive platforms engineered to provide dopamine hits in seconds, has evolved to be the biggest adversary for reading books, which, by requiring a sustained cognitive deep dive with focused attention, competes very poorly.

In the classic O. Henry story The Gift of Magi, a poor, young married couple secretly sacrifice their most prized possessions to buy Christmas gifts for each other — Della selling her knee-length hair to afford a fob chain for Jim’s gold watch, while Jim selling his watch to buy tortoise-shell comb for Della, both rendering their presents useless temporarily. The underlying profound message of the story prioritises love and devotion over material possessions, drawing parallel with the biblical wisemen Magi who are said to have brought the first gifts to the baby Jesus.

Research finds that without the habit of reading, the capacity for lifelong learning and critical thinking, more often than not, stands compromised. So, it definitely pays to inculcate the habit of reading and be the Magi in our children’s lives.

rao.sujathap@gmail.com