Know Your Heritage - 08

We of the modern world are in one sense, people of the Book. This may sound theological to some but no, not in that sense. But we are the people of the Printed Book. The printed book is something which keeps you engaged with yourself by what is within its two covers. If you know the language and if you are interested in the subject, the book opened may be closing for you, many of the things around. But what you are able to take from the book is mainly dependent on you and your reading. Unless some professional or academic consequence is there for your reading, mostly your reading remains unchallenged and untested. Hence reading, by and by, degenerates into mere going through pages or browsing or picking at random or just getting at a sense of what is written. Approximation over approximation makes you ultimately a proud owner of undigested books. Yea you have gone through, seen through, got it roughly and you have some opinion. That is how we are as people of the printed book, mostly. Our busy life justifies it. And not only that, many books are written based on such opinions 'arrived at'. 

But in our heritage they were thinking in terms of 'the study'. It is not the book that counts but your study of it. They have a beautiful word for it. 'Adhyayana'. Adhyayana means studying. Adhyaya means study. Yea. we are using it, the word in the sense of 'chapter'. By contrast, in our heritage, they were people of the study. It is studying which makes you learned. The printed book can just make you an owner. 

When the stress is laid on the studying, you cannot duplicate, you cannot just form an opinion and you cannot be just going through. You have to encounter the whole body of thought that comes in the shape of a book. 

So in our days we can do slight changes in this concept of Adhyaya, study and bring in a culture of reading. In other words becoming 'people of reading' will empower us more as human beings. Not being mere people of books, counting how many books we happen to possess, we can choose to measure our enthusiasm by how many books we have processed in by active reading. Here again we can read through words and pages, while picking up some snippets here and there and call it reading. But active reading is facing the arguments, para by para, withe an eye to the key words and phrases that underline the development. Just beginning by doing one book, makes our process more facile afterwards. And becoming people of the reading is creative in its function. 

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