12 highlights
-
The portrayal of the dynamics between poverty and selfishness in Kafan, the elitist obliviousness of Shatranj ke Khiladi, the indulgent highs and abyssal lows of Nasha—they introduced me to a range of characters, their inner conflicts, their moral dilemmas and the limitations and possibilities of small-town life that I had never experienced before.
-
I teach public policy at a large engineering school. My job is to corrupt students and steer their thoughts away from these conditioned expectations.
-
And above everything else, read. Read wide and deep. Surround yourself with literature from authors all around the world; the more unfamiliar the better. Read the history of places you may never visit, biographies of people you admire, read escapist fiction by the barrel.
-
The same engineers who have taken education to the masses through digital platforms approve marketing strategies that guilt the poor for their lack of resources and their child’s educational deficits.
-
The same business leaders who proudly affirm their nationalism abroad have also replicated the worst forms of discrimination from India’s age-old caste system in their own companies.
-
Engineering education is often seen as an assembly line that produces future employees with requisite skills (of questionable quality at times). What it does not produce often is good citizens, considerate bosses and high-achievers with humility who can admit when they are wrong.
-
In the 1960s, philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message”. In its simplest form, it argues that over a larger period of time, the content that is communicated using a medium (print, radio, TV, internet, social media) is far less consequential than the way a medium moulds collective consciousness, our expectations and world view.
-
Intuitively, we know this: social media has conditioned us to have shorter attention spans and constant engagement. Partisan misinformation through messaging apps is difficult to correct even with hour-long interventions in media literacy training and verification strategies.
-
Sure, one can follow the People’s Archive of Rural India on Instagram, watch Lallantop and Gaon Connection on YouTube, and micromanage their Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage with meaningful news and purge clickbait content.
-
But, the medium is the message; rarely will these mediums give you fully developed characters, deep emotional resonance, historical context, an evocative sense of place and the feeling of walking in someone else’s shoes. An occasional video essay or a long post might hit the spot, and this is where curation becomes essential, but the probability of stumbling upon such thought-provoking content regularly on most of these platforms is woefully low. They are not designed to communicate nuance.
-
Whether it is the intersection of urban poverty and political history in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, the precarity and haze of Delhi’s itinerant labourers in Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, the hilarity and oppression in Veena Venugopal’s The Mother-in-Law or the small-town feudalism and scheming in Tabish Khair’s The Bus Stopped, books and longform writing inevitably expand social imagination in ways few other mediums can.
-
Reading a single work for an extended period of time forces you to avoid task switching. As behavioural economist Sendhil Mullainathan points out, “Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.”