View: Flip the page to the new aristocracy
Once quite common, in the age of far more easily accessible forms of entertainment, the reader of books, is a pursuer of an elite activity
Reading — by which I mean reading books, the same way wearing overwhelmingly suggests wearing clothes — is returning to a state it once was towards the beginning: an elite pursuit. I am not a paper pedant. So, by reading, I don't much differentiate between a physical 'dead tree' copy or a Kindle spirit.
Although I do believe that the book object is the best gateway drug to reading, whether by turning the page, or by sliding the finger across a screen.
Gutenberg may have ultimately made reading a popular pursuit, even a common one, at the height of the reign of the book. But that was a time when entertainment as well as knowledge-gathering didn't have prime contenders like cinema and television, both of which in various formats over the years have made book reading twee. Add social media content to the mix, and reading books finds itself standing outside in the rain.
I travel almost every day on the Metro in a city that is still considered — especially by itself — to be bookish.
Till date, I have encountered not more than five people reading a book, as opposed to watching/listening a phone. In many other countries, the homo lector — reading (wo)man — on the Metro is still a visible subspecies. Not here in this country.
And that, as a member of the upper-middle class with aristocratic posturings, I don't see it as a bad thing. It makes the book reader increasingly like someone behind the wheel of a Bugatti.
The book has always been a technological marvel. But what makes it stand out from other forms of the written word — reports, articles, messages, etc — itself a more exclusive
