The freedom to Read, the courage to Write

The other day I was having a word with my father about how the youth view education, like we only view it as a process which leads to a job which gets you paid and not for knowledge, then my father said something that will not leave my mind for a while, “The real motive of getting educated is not getting to earn, neither it is merely knowledge; rather, it is to become an informed citizen and a good human being”. This gave me a whole new dimension to celebrating Independence and more importantly, to practicing Democracy.

Recently, two headlines figured; one went like, How AI is destroying books to get first-hand data without any copyright claims, the other, equally disquieting, NCERT delaying Nazism, French Revolution by a year moving it from 9th standard syllabus to high school. Now, you must be wondering, what do independence, reading, writing, AI and democracy have to do with each other? Aren’t they contrasting? 

Well, they might not be.

While Indian Freedom fighters were combating the most brutal imperialist colonisers, they also devoted themselves to reading and writing. Take, for instance, Bhagat Singh. In a letter dated July 24, 1930, from Lahore Central Jail, Bhagat asked his friend, Jaidev Gupta to send him books from Dwarakadas Library. His list included books like, Soviets at work, The Civil War in France (Karl Marx), The Spy (Upton Sinclair) and many more. He even asked to send books for other prisoners because there was, in his words, a “famine of books”.

Another of Bhagat’s close associate and a great freedom fighter, Udham Singh, read Warris Shah’s classic epic, Heer Ranjha. He even chose to offer his oath upon it.

Like seriously? Come on.

India wanted freedom, while the so-called freedom fighters were taking up hobbies like reading and writing!

Except they had every incentive to do so.

Freedom can be demanded and, if won, it can be only meaningful when the people yearning for it have the intellectual freedom and the capacity to feel, to think, to question, to empathise and to build. Reading and writing cultivate precisely these, and our renowned freedom fighters understood this.

So, if reading and writing helped us gain independence, perhaps they can also help us celebrate it and help us preserve it.

Thereupon, we can also express our patriotism by reading books, newspapers and writing diaries, stories or whatever we want, all along with traditional ways of saluting the Indian flag, singing the national anthem and devouring motichoor ke ladoos.

Now, again patriotism can only lead to books on politics or nationalism or, at most, history. What about other genres like fiction and the classics? What do they have to do with politics or democracy?

Well... certainly, most of us have already realised that all the facets of an individual’s life, are integrated and interdependent. If someone still lives under the umbrella of isolation, they need to throw it off and drench freely.

Politics leads to history. History leads to religion. Religion leads to spirituality. Spirituality leads to literature. Literature leads to culture. Culture leads to people. People lead to geography. Geography shapes nations. And nations, lead us back to politics.

Everything connects.

Literature develops Empathy and Emotional Quotient. History helps us understand the contemporary trends, that too when you read the fate of Indians during the despotic colonial era, you become more understanding of India’s circumstances and its growth story. We connect not just with an abstract idea called ‘India’, but people who suffered to form India, people who transformed India and people who continue to embrace India.

Furthermore, having a basic understanding of one’s nation’s political mechanisms becomes quintessential at times when power is becoming increasingly unregulated and none fearing.

And yet again, people especially the younger lot, we already have endless stuff going on; be it academics, social media or personal life. When we can simply just search for almost anything and even generate a text from AI, why should we bother to spend hours reading books or struggling through creative writing?

Not everybody wants to be a literature nerd.

Fair enough.

But what many of us are not acknowledging is the worrisome fact that overrelying on outsourcing even the smallest of acts of thinking to AI, will sooner or later cripple human minds and weaken our very unique and very own, essence of creativity, imagination and critical thinking.

Doom-scrolling will only feed what others believe and think, if you want to develop your own ravishingly strange, wonderfully charming mindset and stand apart from the ones who have graduated from the ‘Reels and WhatsApp university’, start reading. Start writing.

Read whatever you like; be it fiction, comics, literature, books about any hobbies maybe.

And write.

Write journals, or just write how your day went or simpler still, write those savage comebacks which appear only hours after the argument is over.

Okay fine, here we go again.

You do not want to read? Then build your library; a library of all the books that may someday disappear from easy access. Trust me it could be one of the best investments you ever make.

You want to know why Books, Diaries and Newsletters are the best kind of investment in an ‘extortionate capitalist world’, because, apart from allowing us to exercise freedom in the modern sense they also get us to care. To care about the people we have never even met. To introduce us to the worlds we have never heard of. And, finally, to lead us towards empathy, goodness, and, as the cherry to our cake, a little respite and a greater peace.

So, this Independence day, if you want to show your gratitude to our freedom fighters and your love for Mother India, do it by troubling your brain a little.

Pick a book, or just a pen.

Tip: Do not forget Ye naya India hai, Yaha sab kuch political hai!

Happiest Independence day!

Here’s to best country in the world. Jai Hind.