— H N Das Ever since the invention and the spread of computers learned societies have worried that the use of books will slow down. Some have even feared that conventional physical books will disappear being replaced by e-books, which have now become thin and highly simplified after the invention of e-ink and the reader device called PRS-505.
It is true that the internet has become ubiquitous. Tremendous amount of information is being stored, retrieved and disseminated through the internet. In his book Business @ Speed of Thought Bill Gates had predicted the emergence and extensive use of a digital nervous system for business and other purposes. He mentioned, in passing, that “every retail (book) store needs to take the Internet into account”. He further elaborated that “the success of the Amazon. Com book-store which exists only on the Internet impelled Barnes & Noble to combine its successful physical book stores with a strong presence in cyberspace and to team up with Bartelsmann, a leading international media company, in an online joint venture.” But Bill Gates did not predict the end of the physical book.
Those of us who belong to the generations born before the cyber-age and had become almost addicted to physical books, in hard cover or paper back, can never shed the pleasure of reading the printed word. For us holding a book or looking at an almirah full of books is a pleasure. Even those who have grown up in the past two decades read physical books beside spending time on the internet.
The number of books published and sold have increased. Printing has become easier and quicker through DTP This is demonstrated by the way books hit the market now a days. A few days after Barack Obama’s election the book “Change We Can Believe In”, was not only published in New York but reached Mumbai. I picked it up from the Taj book store and completed reading before the New Year. Most people must have noticed that in the book-stores even today physical books far outnumber the audio or the video cassettes of the same books.
The situation is similar to the habit of newspaper reading not going down in the age of audio and television. Everyone seems to wait to see the news in “black and white.” I have tried but do not seem to be able to curtail my subscription to the large number of local and metro dailies, beside the usual quota of magazines, inspite of the realisation that in my seventees physical decline has caught up with me. There are quite a few who are having the same predicament.
Looking back on the days of our educational and service careers we sometimes compare notes among our friends and marvel at the number and variety of books we have read in Assamese, Bengali and English. Talking to younger people I find that they still read the books of the classical authors beside the fiction and the non-fiction writers of the twentieth and the twenty first centuries. They mostly read in English but some do read in Assamese also. However, reading of the original texts by the great Bengali writers has diminished considerably among today’s Assamese youths compared to our time.
I often meet young people who prepare for IAS, ACS and other competitive examinations. The top few among them are very well read. They not only read books but use the internet liberally. Then there are those who are intelligent but not very well read. They have to be told what more to read. However, a large number of youths concentrate only on text books. They do not seem to be interested in reading other books. Talking to young university and college teachers I get the impression that they are very well read. Today’s teachers seem to have a much wider horizon. Beside their own subjects they also read books and articles on current affairs, cinema, theatre and about art and culture.
In our days book fairs were rare. Now a days book fairs are held every year in every city and town. Some enterprising publishers have gone even into the rural areas. Fairs provide a window to new books. People do have a tendency to buy books when they visit book fairs and exhibitions. In Kolkata both rich and poor buy books. They save money all the year round in order to buy books at the fair.
I have literally grown up with books. Even as a toddler I used to visit the old Curzon Hall Library on the banks of the Dighalipukhuri with my father. That was the time when our erstwhile neighbour Haramohan Das of Panbazar used to double up as a part-time Librarian in the evenings. He was a school teacher and a writer of eminence. As I grew up I read most of the Assamese books and a few of the Bengali books in that library. I took up the English books later in my school days. I found particular interest in the glossy and illustrated publications on lands and peoples, books on ancient, renaissance and modern art and the compendiums on motor cars and aeroplanes. I read quite a few books by great authors without really understanding their contents. But story books and novels interested me immensely. Books by political personalities, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli (former Prime Minister of UK) were my preferred reading. Disraeli’s novels were boring but, all the same, I read these to learn about English food habits, aristocratic social mores, details of landscape and his version of scintillating political intrigues. I hope that these books are still preserved in the State Library, which has absorbed the old Curzon Hall Library.
I was not alone in being totally addicted to books. There were others from among my friends from the Cotton Collegiate and the Anglo-Bengali High Schools of Panbazar. Many of them achieved eminence in their later careers. We are still in touch with each other. A few years ago the highest circulated Kolkata news paper Ananda Bazar Patrika commented that our Adda, which is more than 65 years old, is unique.
One library which helped me immensely in my post graduate studies is the USIS Library in Kolkata. They had a system of sending books by post for brief periods. The only stipulation was that these must be sent back by the user at his own cost by post. I was also a regular reader of books and journals in the Gauhati University Library. In a recently held National Seminar on Digitalization and Networking of Libraries I clearly stated that my Gauhati University Library tickets are some of my very proud possessions.
In later life I have occasionally used the National Library at Kolkata and the British Library at London whenever I could visit these places. During my posting at New Delhi I had used the USIS Library and the Indian Council of World Affairs Library quite frequently. But the most intense use of library facilities I made was in Adelaide during my two and a half years stay there (1975-77). In that city both the University Library and the South Australian State Library were excellent.
I was fascinated by the microfisch for reading books from tapes which was then a novelty. They also had the system of obtaining books, which the library did not have, from other libraries elsewhere. When I got the opportunity to build up the Assam Adminstrative Staff College Library in the 1980s I used my earlier experience to advantage.
(The writer was Chief Secretary, Assam, during 1990-95) ASSAM TRIBUNE
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