Paperbacks

I always smell my books.

Yes, you read that right.

But no, not at the book shop where there are people milling about. That might  be construed as a shameful act. There I only read some comics end-to-end, spend countless hours reading back cover snippets or sometimes prologues to decide on the books, surreptitiously look at the title of the books that other people are evaluating and some such shameless acts.  (I just realized that the words shameless and shameful have very interesting usage. Yeah, sometimes I shamelessly digress like that.)

No. The act of olfactory investigation comes later.

When I go home after the book purchase sojourn and have finished writing my name, date and place of purchase. (I am reminded of a brilliant piece of dialog from "Up in the air" -   "Men get such hardons from putting their names on things. You guys don't grow up. It's like you need to pee on everything.". Touche. And I already confessed that I digress.).

But that's when I do it. When I am lying down snuggly on the sofa with the book in hand. I caress the spine, feel the letter emboss on the title, open a random page and inhale the euphoric fragrance of a newly printed book.

Yes, it is, in a way, sensual I suppose. After all, what we have with a book is a relationship. In all essence of the word. That is probably why the smell of an old book makes one feel embraced with a familiarity that comes with time. That is probably why an old book's fragrance is not only emotive but also hallucinogenic. For me, It always conjures up an image of a medieval time wooden shack in the middle of a rich forest, filled with the sounds of chirpy birds and rustling leaves and a gurgling brook, all in the back drop of a cloudy grey sky with a pleasantly cool breeze.

And my relationships were only with paperbacks. They age less gracefully but I think it adds to their charm. The motley browning of pages, the frayed edges, crinkles on the spine.  Hardcovers were like celebrity crushes. You know what I mean  right? :/

I had moved on to reading ebooks the last couple of years. There were multiple reasons -non availability of some of the titles that I wanted in the local book shops, the price difference, the convenience of carrying multiple books in a small device, so on and so forth.

Technology has made our lives a lot easier and cooler. I forced myself the bitter pill of migrating to ebooks  and now after a couple of years I buy only on Kindle. Now I do feel pretty ok reading on a digital screen. It's pretty handy - I read on the road, in the metro, at lunch, during boring movies, in travel.

But I miss the fragrance. More than anything. Yes, I also miss the feel of paper and the subconscious anticipation of the end by the relative weights in the right & left hands. But I miss the fragrance. It's almost like the smell adds a separate tangible offering in addition to the actual content. Like a personality.

But such is life. Old gives in to new. Tradition gives in to convenience.

But whatever gives in, lives on.

In flashes of nostalgia, in our dreams, in an subliminal yearning.  

While the new can be convenient and cool, the traditional and the old, while existing only in the memories, still warms the soul.

And while I adopt technology in the fast paced world that we live in, making ends meet, saving for the future, working for my career, I still think of that wooden shack to retire in and read paperbacks.

In tribute to all the paperbacks that have given me company, entertainment, thrills, laughs, knowledge, wisdom and ultimately unwavering friendship. 

Loud Silence

I hear that a relative's relative, who was known to be a kind person, passed away. It saddens me. It does.

I see the news of a terrorist beheading a captive, who ironically was an aid worker. It angers me. It does.

I read articles on economic inequalities and poverty. It makes me guilty. It does.

I get to know of a friend losing his job. It pains me. It does.

And along with the above, a new superhero movie excites me, a thrilling novel entertains me, office work preoccupies me, close family matters worries me and the sight of the street pup running around warms me. It does.

The problem? If I had the time, I would have tweeted or posted something about most of the above in exactly the same sequence as I was exposed to the sensory stimuli.

The bigger problem? I might have done that, probably and circumstances enabling, within the same day. Or a week. But you get the point.

Empathy, broadly, is defined as the ability to recognize and/or share the emotions of another sentient being. This ability lets us acknowledge somebody else's pain, albeit in a subdued and mellowed down form. As social beings I suppose this ability gives us the opportunity to respect somebody else's pain, loss and suffering. And usually this respect is shown by being sober and spartan, by being silent and comforting, by avoiding celebrations and overt expressions of joy.

Maintaining a semblance of this respect, empathy and sympathy in the offline world, that is, the only world that was until a few years ago, seemed delicate enough with its own absurdities, uncertainties, amateurish non-qualified explorations of human psychology, pattern analyses and predictions of people's reactions. The avenues where such mind numbing care had to be taken were far and few. We obviously have the sense not to talk about how interesting the national political scene is or how exciting a film is, to or in the presence of a distressed person.

Cut to the social media age, when I sit back and analyze my own expressions of voices on various e forms I feel like I sound like a complete jerk. To scale it to real life it is akin to saying the following at a stretch in a single room filled with all of the people we are talking to in each of the case, fully audible to everyone in the room.

"CANT WAIT FOR AVENGERS2!!!! Oh, I am so sorry for your loss. Enough of this Bedi Kejriwal Modi crap already. Hahaha look at this funny meme. I strongly condemn intimidation against freedom of speech. I really like your facebook photo. India is going to win the match against Pakistan. I empathise with your tragedy, stay strong. Look at my new photo. AWW LOL CAT."

As a related digression, I am reminded of the following brilliant piece of prose by the fascinating author Gaiman. (In case you haven't read him, do yourself a favour and give his book a try. You won't regret you did)

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.”

So I guess the truth is that -while we all are occupied in our own little worlds and feel our own problems, irrespective of how small they are, are bigger than others and exert effort or tangible action primarily only to influence our little circle- the momentary feelings of sadness, anger, pain and frustration felt at the plight of a fellow human being are as sincere as any. But except a select few who are endowed with indomitable spirit and an inexhaustible ability to empathise, the rest of us rarely actually do anything with these feelings we have.

A case can be made that the larger world does care, given the huge droves of sympathies and empathies shared online. But it is rather betrayed by the fact that the number of hashtags is bigger than the message, that the number of message is too loud to be legible and that the sequence of messages ranges from the truly serious to trolls and memes. The acts of emoting online and claiming support to a cause vociferously, while genuine the intentions may be, are probably only useless proxies for a non-existent action, to effect, to alter, to actually influence.

These high pitched and loud voices, perhaps, are then not visible expressions of underlying actions, but that of a deafening silence.

But I don't think there is any reason to sweat it. It's probably part of being human. It's probably part of being islands. Now that I have arrived at that logical point in my head the question is not whether one can feel sympathy for somebody else and yet completely fail to act beyond one's own world or avoid obsessing about one's own life. 

Because we do that. 

No, the question is whether we are right to tweet about these, like these and post these? Is this violating the basic sense of respect that we show in the offline world to those who are suffering? Does it make us insensitive people?

Well, I don't know. I know many people who are completely disconnected from social media. Some who have a presence but rarely post anything. Some who only likes others posts. And heck, we all have been all of these above someone during some phases. But I am sure some wiser and smarter souls than me have realized this conundrum that I am talking about much earlier and thus remain silent or disconnected on social media? Suddenly, I do have a new found respect for these people. But then they can also simply be silent stalkers who just track people's updates online. Who the hell knows anyway.

Now I will post this on my Facebook - An idle mind's ruminations on a fairly interesting but completely useless aspect of an unarguably first world problem - when kind people are passing away, self less people are getting beheaded, a lot of families remain buried in poverty, millions are perishing in war, famine, disease or hunger and millions more suffering under incapacitating, humiliating social structures.

Why? Because I suppose I don't truly give a shit.
...okay...My abject apologies for the foul language.

Oh, but wait, you don't give any shit too.

PS - Now wasn't that a nice Valentine's day post?