Call it mentor mania, or the amazing impacts of a
good mentor like Dr. Jesudoss Manalan [a librarian par excellence,] on me, I’ve
always made it a point, to coax my wards on paying a visit to some of the best libraries
in town, whenever they find spare time on them!
Yes! no time is free time, we have just
spare time on us, ain’t we! (Here, you may now want to check out for yourselves the difference
between free time and spare time! Please do!)
That said, most of my wards, hence, take time off their schedules
and their commitments, to go and browse for themselves, a library’s amazing
stacks and holdings during their spare time, and even take snapshots of the books
they read! Many make it a point to even send those snapshots to me!
I feel overjoyed when I find students relishing
their spare time rejuvenating their minds, refreshing their thoughts, in the portals of a good library! A future generation of
learners is sure bound to be benefitted beyond measure, thanks to such
dedicated and devoted young minds!
Added, today, at a talk in Loyola
College, Chennai, I had the privilege of exhorting students to buy for
themselves hard copies of books instead of downloading them on pdf all the time!
Publishers and writers would soon become non-entities and fade into oblivion if
this trend continues, I added.
Per chance, there’s a Stephen Hawking or a Zadie
Smith or a Malcolm Galdwell or a Ben Okri or a Derek Walcott or a Amitav Ghosh
waiting to give their valuable thoughts and ideas to society! But when they
find they don’t get their idea’s worth, they might as well opt out of taking
the pains to tune their thoughts to paper! Hence the plea!
Two thoughts here! One on libraries, and
the other on books!
On a related vein, the last time around, when
I paid a visit to one of the bestest bookstores in the city, Starmark at Express
Avenue, I was able to get for myself a wonderful line up of the latest
arrivals! One such book I picked from off the stack was by one of my favys,
Zadie Smith!
It is titled, Feel Free!!!
Well, on an aside, Zadie Smith and Ben Okri have been two
top-notch favys of mine for much of these days!
If Zadie ain’t on my reading zone, then Okri
is!
Zadie’s earnest plea for the rejuvenation
of a bookish culture is manifest in her wonderful take on ‘Generation Why’!!!
To be honest, some of these nostalgic
essays by Zadie Smith are sure bound to bring a beaded bubble winking at the
brim of our eyelids!
Her candid takes are at once both pungent
and at the same time so intriguing as well, which bespeaks to a fervent longing
for the good ol’ past days when books where ‘our bread for daily use and not cake
for special occasions!!!’
She quips at the beginning of this essay,
“Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith,
in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel
uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0.”
Zadie adds on -
You want to be optimistic about your own
generation. You want to keep pace with them and not to fear what you don’t
understand. To put it another way, if you feel discomfort at the world they’re
making, you want to have a good reason for it.
Master programmer and virtual-reality pioneer
Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us
well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget, which
chimes with my own discomfort, while coming from a position of real knowledge
and insight, both practical and philosophical.
Lanier is interested in the ways
in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description
of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information
in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics).
In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect
computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know
this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget.
In Facebook, as it is with other online social
networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier
argues, which is based on [a] philosophical mistake . . . the belief that
computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships.
These are things computers cannot
currently do. We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We
know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know
that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others.
We know what we are doing “in” the
software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is
it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes
their truth?” What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot,
is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral!
When a human being becomes a set of data
on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.
Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a
transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires,
our fears.
It reminds me that those of us who turn
in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of
self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t
look more free, they just look more owned.
The last defense of every Facebook addict
is: But it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail
and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to
interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know.
If we really wanted to write to these
faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare
minimum, just like any nineteen year-old college boy who’d rather be doing
something else, or nothing!
In this sense, The Social Network is not
a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.”
It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the
recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.!!!
In yet another essay, she has a wonderful
take on libraries –
All libraries have a different character
and setting. Some are primarily for children or primarily for students or the
general public, primarily full of books or microfilms or digitized material or
with a café in the basement or a market out front.
Libraries are not failing “because they are
libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides
the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because
what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public
space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
It’s not just a matter of free books. A library
is a different kind of social reality (of the three-dimensional kind), which by
its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
To conclude, the only other collection of
essays that I’ve found so endearing to the heart, next only to Salman Rushdie’s
Imaginary Homelands, is Zadie Smith’s Feel Free!
Please feel free to check this book out, at your nearest bookstore!
For once, not the pirated pdf copies
please! One honest hard copy - for the heart, by the heart, from the heart!
Your reading gets nobler, that way, alleyyy? ;-)
Feel Free! :-)
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