Reader's Block

One of my occupational hazards is travel which comes with an inescapable wait at airports, lounges and the like. A positive fallout of this drudgery is an opportunity to catch up on reading (books). As I waited to catch an early evening flight last week, I was bemused to observe everybody poring into multi-hued newspapers with not a single soul attempting to read anything else. Morning flights are replete with identical sights. An added plethora of self-important professionals type away furiously on their laptops.

I failed to grasp the import of going over a newspaper in the evening having presumably done so in the morning too. (None of these newspapers have evening editions, at least not publicly known ones) Ditto for the laptop addicts. Were it not for a painful flight, their slumber would have ordinarily deprived employers of their new-found creativity in the wee hours of the morning anyway.

And yet, most people I meet lament the absence of available time to catch up on reading. Frequent travellers apart, even those who spend a couple of hours a day on Facebook, 6 hours a week catching up on movies (not counting travel time to Cinema) often complain about the inadequacy of a mere 24 hours in a day. P G Wodehouse is invariably something one "used to read" and favourite authors are typically those one read in college (or even school) . An honourable exception though is unfailingly made for decorated works (read "Booker Prize Winning") of Indian authors a la "The WhiteTiger". However mediocre some of these tomes may be, there is a potential risk of being perceived as an embarrassing illiterate in a gathering where everybody has "found time" to read this one magnum opus in 3 years. Hence, the authors laugh their way to the bank.

As a consequence, most of our social networks tend to largely revolve around current or former colleagues. In the absence of expanding or deepening interests, the opportunity to discuss mundane and often irrelevant happenings at workplace is a convenient fallback.
A second and more serious fallout is for the forthcoming generation. It is highly unlikely they shall seek enrichment through non-curriculum reading. Is it surprising a far higher number of parents tend to boast of their progeny's skill with gadgetry, sport (or even mimicry) as opposed to vocabulary?

Make no mistake I am not the world's best known bibliophile. I would not even qualify as a voracious reader. But my last sojourn in an airport lounge painfully exposed me to the demise of the "bookworm" (face it, you last heard this term in school!).