This is yet another of those posts that has been triggered by something I read in The Hindu. It is a piece on the experiences of a journalist by Ms Soma Basu. You can read the article here, provided you manage to sneak past a pesky paywall. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/legacy-of-the-printed-word/article38073787.ece.
Alternately if you take the print edition, like me, but missed reading it you can read it in The December 31st edition.
Ms Basu talks about the joy of reading the printed word. The printed word here would mean content that is published on paper and not on some electronic device. The distinction matters because the tactile and cognitive experience of reading "hard copy", to borrow from the digital world, is different in many ways from reading off a screen.
I cannot agree more with Ms Basu on this. But then I must point out I am 62. And I have this weakness for crunching numbers. That is my training after all.
According to the Indian census data I must be among the oldest five percent of the population. You further need to keep in mind that amongst us a non-trivial fraction may have abandoned the printed word in favour of the wailing telly serial or the distilled wisdom that Whatsapp dispenses by the hour. That should be a non trivial fraction of people who deserted.
And then there should be those who are not fortunate enough to be able to read any more due to failing eyesight, inability to assimilate thanks to a faltering brain and so on.
Net net, people savouring the printed word are truly a small fraction of the Indian population - if you leave out the vast majority which is the younger crowd. How many of the younger crowd would still read the printed word is hard for me to say. Among all the people below the age of forty that I know I cannot think of anyone who reads print. Literally no one.
Considering that as a teacher I come across a large number of them in spite of my reclusive predilections, that is a trend I cannot ignore.
Much as I would want the printed word to live forever, I fear that its end is near. An end that no one can really stop. It is just a part of that inexorable march of human progress. It is ironic in that a space of less than a quarter to half a century mankind will bid goodbye to a truly important invention to which we owe much of contemporary civilisation as we know it. An invention that took 650 years to diffuse, since it was revealed to the world in 1476 by Caxton.
It does not surprise me though. To draw on my favourite philosopher, much vilified and ridiculed now at the altar of prosperity, change is the only constant in life. That is okay.
But Ms Basu's piece coincided with another conversation that made me wonder about all this printed word versus the electronic screen debate from a larger perspective. That conversation did seem to have a few parallels.
It was - a Whatsapp forward, what else? - that admonished that as humans we spend a full year of our life time in the toilet. The tone of the message appeared to be to suggest that each of us likely wastes a whole year of life, disgorging waste.
When this was first read out to me by my wife I was impressed with the analysis. It sounded almost epiphanic that I would spend such a long period in a place that we feel embarrassed to talk about. I am a sucker for anything that has a certain numerical precision to it. You can read more about this weakness of mine here. https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1587084401918471083/4982182331953715247
But then I realised that I had heard similar analyses pointing to larger fractions of one's life being spent in equally wasteful ways. People who exhort us to increase the allocation of our time to the contemplation of the Lord tell us how we spend a quarter to a third of our or life sleeping.
Now, that math is straight forward, more so than the math underlying the year in toilets. The math about the year in toilets would be a greater modelling challenge to those of who spend a life building mathematical models as a way of understanding anything in life - from the likelihood that a virus might get to us or that we may eventually find someone to fall in lobe with us, be it the sexual or asexual way.
Just think about the number of variables involved in figuring out the time in a toilet. Throw on top of that the biological diversity amongst humans. You might even need a well configured system to run the simulations. Let me leave that speculation as exercise for your left brain.
But then here is the larger perspective on the question of how we waste our time. What is this big deal about how we spend our time that we seems to possess all contemporary conversations? This thing about productivity. What are we chasing at the end of the day?
Is that even a part of the larger design in evolution if, like me, you are captivated by Darwin's theory of evolution? Or, in the way the world began with the word? If it was so why or how did so many millions of creatures that came to be, spend their lives not caring about the way they spent their lives, or about elusive issues like the purpose of life and so on?
According to the emerging view from anthropology it appears that it was all just an accident that we are all the way we are: Homo Sapiens. There is no reason why it should not have turned out differently. A world where there is no word, printed or otherwise. No God. Just plain existence, where all of us in the alternate forms that we may have assumed may have spent one day at a time, with nothing to mark one day from another. No joy. No sorrow. No anger. Not even lust. Just the primitive drive for food and other biological needs.
So if it was all just an anthropological accident that we are where we are, that I type these inconsequential words, does it matter that it is consumed from a hard copy or some electronic screen? Or, that it was not even produced in the first place, let alone the way it is consumed?
These are difficult questions to answer. Quite probably irrelevant too. But as I reflected on Ms Basu's thoughts on the printed word I could not stop my mind from racing in this hyperlinked manner.
None of that is of course to suggest that I can think of a more refreshing way to start my day than with a cup of filter coffee with 10% chicory, freshly brewed dicoction, mixed with freshly boiled milk, with its foamy head and a copy of The Hindu.
Here is also hoping that in the years left for me in this world that simple pleasure does not get supplanted by a cup of tea and a copy of a Hindi daily - all in the name of one nation, one drink and one newspape.
Nanni... Namaskaaram...
