Bibliophiles' Day

 The title appears tough to you, right? It is meant to be! Why? Well, in a way, the article is a dirge, a deeply sad comment on a huge lack in the contemporary world. Any guesses? Well, most would not get it because they would not even be aware of the important message hidden in the title.

Let us hence open it up. Well, in simple terms, a bibliophile is someone who loves books, who hence considers reading an essential activity. Indeed a rare species these days! There is, moreover, a rarer still chance of the revival of this extinct species.

Who reads these days? Well, the medium does not matter these days, whatever Marshall McLuhan may have said. Many people are in to the Kindle mode. Though I am a bit wary about them (because they take away the charm of imagining, a core facet of the process of reading), audio books are here to stay. 

Well, given the realities these days, such a change of medium, be it online or be it the audio mode, it hardly matters because things have come to such a pass that not merely libraries, but book shops, too, even of the footpath/the roadside variety are closing!  ''Do people read at all?" That is the 'call' these days.

Actually reading is a gestalt among  the author and the reader and the reality as analysed by the author. Reading hence enriches us both as a scholar, and better still, as a human being.

Hence the need to celebrate the National Reading Day, the Bibliophiles' Day as the title of this blog puts it, as it helps the ordinary indian adore books. It falls on August 9, most often the first/second Saturday of the month, an auspicious beginning, as the week-end thus begins. Sure there are thus the possibilities of social/religious gatherings.

Yet the day is an invite to the world of reading as well. It is the day to explore, to analyse, to like, to debate books and the world that they encase! Long live August 9, the revolutionary day in this sense as well as it leads to the evolution of each and every reader. Long live reading!

Pratima@ Some people are born readers, some people attain the reading skill. No use forcing it. Yet it makes you its own, once it acquires you, like nothing else can!