“The Downfall of World Book Day”
(Special Feature on World Book Day)
✍️ Dr. Mukesh Aseemit
Today is World Book Day. Not because people will actually sit down to read books, but because they'll need a few to pose with for selfies. Instagram is buzzing with hashtags like #BookLoverForever, and in the comments someone writes, “Read Chacha Chaudhary as a kid, nothing beats that!” There was a time when books were read with devotion, licked through, hugged tight, even used in sibling fights to whack each other. But now? Books have taken on the same fate as those TV channels removed from the remote — they sit in maun tapasya. Once proudly displayed in cupboards, they now remain forgotten in mobile bookmarks, and even those bookmarks stay stuck on half-read chapters, just like the first draft of some government scheme. Today is also the day for the ceremonial Facebook status — “On this great occasion, remembering The Story of My Experiments with Truth,” usually accompanied by a random Harry Potter cover image. The truth is, books today are no longer read — they’re merely quoted. That too, only when you’re trying to impress someone with a love letter or when you're auditioning for the role of a ‘serious intellectual’ on Facebook.
My own childhood was one long game of hide-and-seek with books. Even youth passed by with a face hidden behind their covers. Memories tied to books are so universal, you'd think everyone had the same script — just like every household has a ‘Ramu Kaka’, every childhood had Champak, Nandan, Parag, Chacha Chaudhary, and Billu. In our village, we had gangs — not for gangwars, but bookwars. Someone brought Champak, someone had Parag, and the trade began. We had our own stock market: rent-a-comic for ten paise a day! Then one day, the rental rate became 25 paise, but we didn't give up. Ten kids would gather to read the same comic, passing it one by one like public property — because for us, that’s what books were.
As we grew older, we sought thrill and found it in the pages of Gulshan Nanda, Ved Prakash Sharma, Surender Mohan Pathak, Om Prakash Sharma, Colonel Rajput, Rakesh, and Chandrakanta Santati. The hunger for reading was such that we’d hide books under our pillows and read them by dim lamp light until dawn — electricity didn’t go back then; it simply didn’t exist. Then came the era of Bhootnath. When my father brought that fat volume home and said, “Just look at it, don’t read it yet,” it instantly became our forbidden fruit. The moment Bhootnath landed in our hands, we entered a ten-day trance of ghostly obsession. In a village with no TV or cinema, books and magazines were the only source of entertainment. School textbooks existed, yes — but only in the sense that we hurled our schoolbags into corners the moment we got home and rushed off to play, leaving the bags lying there like abandoned souls awaiting our return.
I still remember how we turned entire books into abstract art with our red and blue pens, mistaking underlining for absorption. We kept peacock feathers and neelkanth feathers between pages — not as bookmarks, but as spiritual gestures to Vidya Mata, the Goddess of Knowledge, silently praying, “Please, descend tonight and inscribe everything we read upon our foreheads.” Just collecting those feathers required all-day chases through fields, just so that we could secure some divine grace during exams. The drama of unfinished homework, the teacher’s thunderous warnings — “If I don’t see your homework tomorrow, you’ll be made into a murga!” — but our pustak-neeti was simple: books are not to be touched until the first school bell rings. Thank the heavens the government hadn’t issued any warnings like “Do not touch unattended items,” or we might never have touched our schoolbags at all.
By the time I reached college, my relationship with books deepened. During MBBS, I must have read at least fifty different books — and sincerely, because you simply couldn’t pass without reading. Every subject had its own fat tome. When PG started and we had to buy books like Campbell, I realized for the first time — gyaan mehenga hota hai. A book worth ₹10,000 had a photocopy version for ₹3,000 — and with that pirated version, we felt like we’d taken a holy dip in the Ganga of knowledge. Today I see my son — in MBBS with just two or three books, and the same story continues in PG. The rest is all digital: mobile, laptop, video lectures. Real books now feel like memories of ex-lovers — remembered only during nostalgia-induced Facebook statuses.
I still believe that even if textbooks are read out of compulsion, a bond is formed — the kind that begins with holding a book’s finger and walking into the forest of knowledge, eventually arriving in literary alleyways. That feeling of a book resting on your lap or by your pillow — it can never be matched by a tablet or an e-book. Even cinema used books as romantic props — the shy heroine wandering around campus with a book, which she ‘accidentally’ drops, and lo! the hero appears like destiny with “Haye, main lut gaya!” written all over his face. Thus began Chapter One of love.
Where have those days gone when lovers hid blood-inked love letters — “Likhta hoon patr khoon se, syaahi mat samajhna” — inside pages of books? Now books are neither in our bags nor in our hearts. Sure, people build digital libraries — just to look educated during Zoom calls. But the real books? They’re still waiting, hoping someone will flip their pages and say, “Kitaabon, tum hi to meri pehli dost thi!” I swear on Vidya Mata, if books hadn’t existed, maybe I wouldn’t have either — at least not as a ‘Dr.’
Today, Book Day has silently turned into Book Memorial Day. So let’s at least pledge this much on World Book Day — that next time we buy a book, we won’t stop at taking a selfie with it, we’ll actually read two pages too. Otherwise, the book might just whisper back — “Teri galliyon mein na rakhenge kadam aaj ke baad!” 📚😄
