To prepare myself for the recent movie on Napoleon, the history buff inside me realized that it was finally time to pick up Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece War and Peace, a book that I had been avoiding reading for over a year because of its intimidating thickness and prose that I assumed would be very difficult to absorb. Picking up an epic in today’s time and age feels like a task, but as I touched the halfway mark of the 1,300-page book, I was reminded of my adventures with other equally long books that I would virtually gobble up in my youth.
As a young engineering student many moons ago, books were my only escape from the complex world of capacitors, resistors, and annoying types of circuits named after ancient people in faraway lands. With minimal distractions in the pre-3G era, I would spend my summer breaks doing reading marathons, targeting at least 20 books each month and completing 1,500-page tomes in under a week. That these books also helped me improve my English vocabulary in preparation for competitive exams was an added advantage, but in the absence of social media, books were read for the pleasure one got from them, and not for bragging rights on social media.
Today, attention spans have reduced considerably owing to distractions offered by social media and dopamine-on-demand platforms disguised as OTT channels, among other things. Consequently, reading an epic like War and Peace, or any longish book for that matter, requires remarkable commitment. With one or the other literature festival looming, new books are released every second day, and my list of books to-be-read (TBR) keeps growing exponentially. My business-school trained mind often ends up weighing the pros and cons of picking one book over the other, and trying to balance reading books for my own joy versus reading books for professional and personal development. Worst of all, with people vying to read 52 books each year, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can quickly kick in among readers; I have shamelessly succumbed to this FOMO in the past, only to realise that reading to chase goals takes away every bit of joy associated with reading a book. It is ironic that in the past, books were a privilege for the most educated people but today, with books more accessible than ever, reading is not a popular activity.
The pandemic, when I was forced to stay inside, was the last time I spent as much time with my books as I would like to. Today, I have learnt how to carve out time for reading, though it might make reading appear to be a chore. With modern day workloads on the professional front, it can often become difficult to switch one’s mind from work mode and channel one’s inner bibliophile, but it is in moments like these that true commitment to read helps calm the mind. On weekends, when my friends are out enjoying the increasingly expensive weekly drink in the pubs of Bangalore, I find myself heading to quaint cafes in search of the perfectly brewed coffee to enjoy the latest book I am hooked to. As a child, I remember my mother, an eminent doctor, taking out at least 15 minutes to read before going to bed regardless of how busy her day had been. These days, I too make it a point to spend some time with Leo Tolstoy’s work every night — and that is when the French-speaking high society of Tsarist Russia and the battlefields of Napoleon’s victories come alive in the pages of War and Peace, though it’s often only for the 20 minutes before I go to bed.
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