Books: an endangered species?

The following is my 2nd Toastmasters speech: Organize Your Speech

Some people say we have only one life. They have never read a book.
For books give us the opportunity to step into the shoes of a sharp detective and solve the mystery of Hound of Baskervilles, to fall in love with Juliet, to fall in love with the departmental head’s daughter despite being a five point someone at an IIT, to make a journey to the centre of the earth, to travel to far away galaxies, to play chess with death himself, and to do much more.

This printed object woven between two covers did not even exist five and a half centuries ago. Gutenberg, the German businessman invented print and voila, all this hoopla about books. But didn’t people learn and share knowledge before the time of Gutenberg? Wasn’t there Papyrus scrolls? Who said books cannot evolve as well? After all, the shiny little gadget which graces your pockets, is that the same monstrous instrument called telephone that Mr. Alexander Graham Bell invented? So even if people read e-books, let’s encourage that. Of course, bookworms would have to find something else for a profession but that’s another story.

Speaking of profession, we are all professionals. We are busy with fulfilling our official duties and running personal errands. Do we really get time to read? In fact, research has shown that reading, especially in the developed countries, is on the wane. In American universities, scholars have termed this generation: a Post-Literate society. A society where people know how to read, they have that capacity but they won’t read. They’d much rather go to the discos, surf the internet, play video games or watch television. Well I personally find television very educating. Whenever someone turns on the set, I go to the other room and read a book. But, that’s just me. The million dollar question is, if internet and other avenues of entertainment are so appealing, why would people read books?
In order to answer that, let’s find out what would have happened if books never existed. What if no one ever told us: “The world’s a stage where everyone must play a part”? What if Hamlet never procrastinated: “To be or not to be”? What if Harry Potter never weaved any magic? What if Humpty Dumpty didn’t have a great fall? Can you imagine such a world? What if Jules Verne never took us Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea?

Regarding Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, once said, “I’m sure we wouldn’t have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who wrote about it and made people think about it. I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.”

Well, you might say what we don’t know can’t hurt us, right? Wrong. Ignorance is not bliss. Creativity, literature, art, books are the soul of any civilization and it would surely be the bane of modern society if we discouraged reading in any form.

Let me share a small personal story. When I first went to Pune, for my first job, I did not know a soul here. I had no friends, no relatives no acquaintances. I was all alone in a big city. But I had my books. And I had my world. Just the knowledge that a good book awaits us at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Outside a dog, book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read!

In Pune, one of the first books I read was "Shantaram". It’s an autobiographical account of an Australian named Gregory David Roberts. He was a budding poet who lost his daughter after separation from his wife. He got addicted to heroin to overcome his loss. To support his addiction, he started armed robbery. He was caught and convicted for 20 years. He escaped from this maximum security prison and fled to Mumbai. He learnt Marathi, fell in love, lived in the slums, established a free clinic there, worked for the underworld, went to fight for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and if you thought he he led a dull life, hear this: he acted in a couple of Bollywood movies in between. The book is hard hitting and savage yet tender and lyrical. The vivid imagination and lyrical imagery of the man is so profound, it will leave you spellbound. If it wasn’t for this wonderful medium called book, we would never have known about the remarkable story of this extraordinary “criminal”.

Hitler, the greatest criminal of all, tried to burn all books in Germany to inhibit free thinking and creativity there. You don’t need to destroy books to destroy society. You just get people to stop reading them. And where books are burnt, people would be burnt sooner or later. We all know what happened to Germany in Hitler’s hands. He tried to eradicate an entire race from the face of the earth just because he believed if his own racial superiority. This is what happens when you don’t respect books. So let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and let’s gift our posterity a world which is free, where the light of knowledge illuminates our hearts and minds and graces our souls.

We all have a big part to play in this. Let’s promise to ourselves that we would all read more books, we’ll spread awareness of the importance of reading and learning, we’ll present more books to our friends, we’ll even try to receive more books as presents – you now know what to give me for my birthday!

The books that help you most are those that make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy learning but a great book by a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. So let’s make a pledge today, that we would try to find this truth and beauty in the world around us and more importantly in the people, from various cultures, across all boundaries, of different nationalities and from all walks of life. Let’s promise, to read and read and read. Amen.