“A book is a gift you can open again and again” says Garrison Keillor. My father inculcated and nurtured my reading habit as he took me to local book exhibitions when I was young and made sure that I enrolled myself in the Goa State Central Library, then housed in Institute Menezes Braganza, Panjim. As a kid, as my reading grew, books espoused my curiosity to understand the world better. A study conducted by B Greene in 2001 says it aptly “Reading habit is best formed at a young impressionable age in school, but once formed it can last one’s lifetime”.
Reading encourages sound scholastic development of the mind. The
most direct outcome of the reading is it strengthens vocabulary and leads to a
fluid formation of comprehensible sentences. Reading allows the mind to go
through an assortment of characters, their lives, ambitions, nuances thus
allowing it to weave a story. It empowers and emancipates citizens, and it
brings people together. It helps to form opinions and guide one’s judgements.
It fuels up the imagination and makes us receptive to new ideas. It allows and
fosters re-thinking and questioning about themes to which non-readers cling
without any understanding. It allows one to be empathetic and liberal in
viewing society. Reading is an investment that pays rich dividends in life.
However, reading habit has taken a backseat in this online
world. There are three essential steps for any habit to form: a trigger, the
process and a reward, says Adam Grant. This method has been mastered by the
greatest distractors of all time: the social media giants! The smartphone
notification (the trigger), countless feeds of pictures/videos (the process)
and instant gratification one gets (the reward) fully utilise the caveat of
habit formation. While on the other hand, reading a book or a newspaper compels
the effortful mind to think over facts and assimilate the ideas. Though
development in technology has brought books at our fingertips in the form of
e-books, e-magazines or e-journals, it has been poorly successful in imbibing
the reading habit. This notion is bolstered by the scene of students in the
reading rooms of libraries seen fiddling with the smartphone screens.
The advent of audio books has tried to replace the traditional
methods. Lack of dedicated time (or will for it) for reading has been monetised
by companies that offer books to listen to on the go. Since the brain cannot
multitask effectively, listening to a book while doing chores does not allow us
to absorb the essence of a book. In contrast, reading a book evokes undivided
attention and facilitates the development of focusing ability, thus also
leading to more absorption of the contents.
I consider custodians of a library to be the luckiest people on
earth, while the visitors to be next in the hierarchy to be lucky! However, as
we move up through the educational hierarchy, the tradition of visiting a
library slowly disappears from the curriculum. The students are embroiled with
the syllabus and supplied with readymade notes, thus diminishing the need to visit
a library. Therefore, visiting the library must be allocated a place in the
regular timetable.
Source: Herald, 11/11/21
