Long forgotten are
the days when people in India read books because they were classic or listed on
the HT bestseller list for more than 4 or 5 weeks; now they read books because
either a relative or the colleague next door has written it.
I remember, on our
first official date, my Ex questioned about my area of interest and I replied
with, “I prefer books over anything and everything” instantly she made a
comeback with, “have you read this extremely witty novel ‘Oops! I fell in
Love!’ by Harsh Snehanshu”; conspicuously she disclosed her deepest feeling
coveted carefully under the name of the book but to my own surprise I ended up reading
the name of books she has read.—An
Average Indian Reader she was.
Who is an Average
Indian Reader???
A person who flits between
books by J K Rowling and Jack Trout, on a wheeler stall at a railway station
and ends up buying a “Bollywood on Paper” novel by Chetan Bhagat or by Dimpled
Durjoy.
Or
An engineering
graduate who started his reading career with a novel, his friend referred to
him saying, “Padh bhai! apni hi kahani
hai!”. The engineer definitely got fascinated with the extreme simplicity
of language and enamored by the pursuit of similar life book served with.
Few days down the
time line the engineer who once had innocuous attitude towards everything
related to books is now found visiting bookstores like Crossword and ends up
buying all the books based on college romance, mostly by engineers.
This engineer,
slowly and gradually starts growing with time into an avid reader with a taste.
He spends all his days reading, partially blushing and partially getting
sexually aroused.
Then one bad day
when it’s raining outside; a slanderous comment from a random guy in class
makes him stagger, “I don’t read Indian authors, because all they write is
Crap”.
He feels
hypothetical and makes an erratic decision of shifting from Chetan Bhagat to
Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho. Choosing Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho has got no primal
research behind them; they are just the names on HT bestseller list other than
Bhagat and Durjoy.
With time this
enthusiastic and lucid engineer has turned into a reader; who is now on a
journey of literature where he will be dismayed thinking about the time and
money he wasted on Indian writers; he will get to experience the real feel of
reading-between-the-lines and he will be pleasured reading books from the West
and the Middle East and with this an avid reader will rise and an Average
Indian reader will die.
In the contemporary
India, reading is a journey, where a person gets excited by the Metro reads;
discovers more with the books from Middle East and finally ends up drinking
numerous cups of coffee in a bookstore while reading an exquisite tale of
romance or magic coveted in a beautiful jacket either by P.G Wood House or by
Ray BradBury.
Pranav
