Ray Bradbury’s famous quip, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture; just get people to stop reading them” encapsulates the tragedy that has fallen upon our country today. For a country where the old book shops dotting the corners of every bazaar used to bustle with customers all week, the newfound rarity of these stores highlights a tremendous shift in cultural values.
In the age of the Internet and technological advances such as e-books that have allowed our world an unprecedented access to information globally, it is ironic that despite the sheer excess of material, it is this very generation to whom the notion of reading books seems foreign. Instead of attracting our youth to read more books, these technological advancements have opened up more appealing options for the youth: social networking, video games, movies and music for the asking, just a few amongst a multitude of electronic entertainment options. The problem can be distilled to this: the youth are simply no longer interested in reading books, surely a terrifying prospect for any culture that wishes to produce well-rounded individuals.
To top it all off, a meager three percent of our yearly budget and less than 500,000 educational institutes — ranging from primary schools to universities — are expected to facilitate the education of over a hundred million individuals aged below 24. Not only have we allotted a laser-thin slice of our budget to education, but this money is also not handled properly due to the widespread corruption that plagues our society today, and finally the little that makes its way to the actual education sector is not always directed towards the most efficient usage. In trying to bridge this tremendous gap between the needs of our people for basic education, perhaps it is not surprising that we have forgotten the importance of reading books as a vital part of education.
The power of a book to challenge the mind, to speed up the thought process, to empower the reader, to inspire, to make us believe and move us to tears is a concept we are all familiar with. Books help us relate to others and other cultures and allow us to develop a greater understanding of the world we live in today and gift us the power to seamlessly create entire worlds in our minds. As Steven Fischer put it, “Surely there can be no greater wonder.”
The importance of all of this in a child’s life is what we have forgotten today. In the youngest of children, reading helps develop an aptitude for learning, equips them with basic speech skills, improves their communication skills and enhances their concentration span all of which are extremely important tools in creating a foundation for academic excellence within a child.
What then is to be done to bring back the love of reading?
It is the responsibility of each parent to ensure that they inculcate a love of reading within their child by taking the initiative of bringing their children to bookstores and educating their child about the importance of reading in their everyday life. Events such as the Lahore Literary Festival and the Annual Book Festival can help kindle the love of books by showcasing the talented authors from Pakistan and around the world. We can also integrate social media and networking with these events to attract the youth who otherwise live out a drab online existence.
Furthermore, as the privileged sector of society, we need to understand that we have the power to foster a culture of reading books for pleasure within the rest of society as well. Initiatives such as the Alif Laila Book Bus are beacons of hope within our society today and through their untiring efforts are successful in showing us that we are the only ones capable of making a change, because we understand the gravity of the predicament our society is in today.
It is only by acknowledging that the problem exists, then understanding that we have the power to come up with a solution to the problem, and finally, acting upon it, that we can bring this change in Pakistan. And luckily for our children, the people of Pakistan have shown us time and time again that when we decide to get something done, there is absolutely nothing that can come in our way.
The writer is an aspiring med-student, currently enrolled in the A’Level
programme at a school in Lahore