“Reading Maketh A Full Man”

‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man’, so says Francis Bacon in his charmingly epigrammatic style. Although the saying mentions three different skills—reading, conferencing and writing—to convert a commoner into a learned and scholarly person, and all these three skills are equally important, yet at present the topic of this very article is reading i.e. using libraries.

In this modern age, with its huge influx of technology, the pace of life has increased to a considerable amount. The fast modes of transportation; discoveries and inventions in the field of computing; all round presence of mobile phone companies; internet and media, print and electronic, have no doubt added a lot to the life of man but the fact remains that these alluring attractions—or you may call them facilities—have also deprived man of some of the finest aspects of life. Reading i.e. the reading of books and the use of libraries in general, is one of these finest aspects.

Everyone about us is running short of time. I have no time is a common parrot-like utterance by everyone with whom you want to talk about learning, knowledge, philosophy or in short, books. But if a thorough and careful probe is set up into the lives of most people around us who claim to be busy, one finds nothing so special on which the precious treasure of time should be spent or more accurately, wasted. Going on a long drive, attending a dinner, which normally lasts till the dawn, listening to some pop-star in the town, loitering about a beach in the full moon, spending hours and hours of no use on the internet, sharing meaningless jokes and messages by texting just for the sake of texting, watching television, and the most common of all, spending hours in back-biting. These so-called important activities may have some plus points, except the back-biting, if a suitable amount of time is spared for them, but mostly, as it is a general observation, all these pursuits are but the wastage of time.

On the other hand, if the record of checking in at a library is monitored minutely, the situation is pathetic. Only a few teachers, professors or some retired citizens visit libraries to enhance their knowledge or to fulfill their needs which they cannot do with their own money. Some just come to kill the time. Some students, who cannot afford to purchase books, are also reported to attend libraries. Book-reading for the sake of broadening vision and expanding the realm of knowledge has become a very rare commodity. It is an extremely sorry fact that even the use of a library, by and large, has become a matter of trade i.e. if it is having any monetary value, well it is good; otherwise, what is the use of rubbing one’s head against the dusty book-shelves.

What we miss in our society is a library culture. Art for art’s sake, if it must be put more precisely, is lacking seriously. Libraries have become the most neglected sites of learning in our society. A large number of books in libraries are stuck to each other because nobody bothers to take them out. Cobwebs, dust and sometimes cockroaches escort these treasures of wisdom.

The tragedy is that our approach has changed. Going to a library and spending some time over there is wastage of time for most of us; and the one who does so is the renowned Bore in his circle. Since the time we have started ignoring libraries, our voices have become hollow and our speeches mere hysterical shrieks; our words do not carry weight and our ideas are utterly impractical, if at all they are. We waste hours and hours on useless pursuits but we find it really very hard to sit in front of an open book for ten minutes. We have either too much time or no time.

The need of the hour is to change our attitudes and develop a responsible and carefully designed structure of our society because greatness germinates in the heat of responsibility. If knowledge is not part and parcel of our lives, how can we learn what responsibility is. If we look at the past history of any great nation that has lived on this earth, we only find one single factor working behind its greatness and that is knowledge. History also tells us that when any of the great nations of the past changed its preferences and distanced itself from books, it was doomed to failure. But, unfortunately we have not learnt the best of things from history. Even if we look at today’s world, we see those nations are in the lead that put education as their first preference. Although the developing and under-developed nations do not have such remarkable facilities of rich libraries on diverse disciplines as the developed nations of this world have, yet the dark side of the picture is that the former do not use what they have. A thorough examination will demonstrate that rulers, politicians, policy makers and even teachers in developing and under-developed countries do not put learning and knowledge at the top on their priority list. In this scenario, students or the youth cannot be called the chief culprits.

If only we develop a reading habit, we can not only change our destiny, but we can also pave new paths for our coming generations. For this, we all, particularly the poor nations, must have to recognize the importance of learning and we must educate the youth because they are our tomorrow. Putting them to reading habit is the best investment which will profit the world tomorrow and forever. In this regard the most important tool is the teacher, though it is a collective effort and every member of the society should take it on with a sense of great responsibility. If the elder of our world can present their example before the youth, we can hope of a great change which at present is not only difficult but also impossible in the all-time-presence of fascinating distractions e.g. smart phones, tablets, laptops and iPods: time-killing tools which connect you to the unfathomable ocean of the internet wherever you are. For example, according to one of the British newspapers, there were 46 million regular internet users in 2012 and they, collectively, spent 37 billion hours online. This is just one example of a country. We cannot say that all these hours were wasted but generally speaking much of this time is spent on the greatest time killer of all times: the facebook.  These statistics also show the death of social life. This needs to be changed to better our world in the long run. We have to bring all, in general, and our youth, in particular, back to libraries if at all we are serious and sincere about our bright future.