SANJAY PANDITA
Reading was once a ritual, and like all rituals, it was performed with a sense of reverence. It was not merely an act of passing time, but of entering time itself—the time of others, of civilizations long gone, of voices that refused to die. To read a book was to sit in dialogue with minds one could never meet, to feel the intimacy of wisdom flowing across centuries as if it were whispered directly into the ear. It was a companionship that needed no witness, no applause, no recognition, only the quiet rustle of pages and the silent surrender of the reader’s soul.
Today, however, the silence of books has been overrun by the restlessness of screens. What was once considered an almost sacred act of attention has been reduced to a hurried exercise in consumption. And so the question presses upon us with a kind of melancholy urgency: is the age of true reading—deep, slow, transformative reading—slipping from our grasp? And if so, what will become of writing, that child of reading, born not from statistics and scrolling but from the sedimented depths of imagination nourished by books?
Civilization itself was born in ink. Before swords carved empires, clay tablets preserved myths; before cathedrals rose, scrolls carried prayers; before nations announced their borders, books defined their souls. The survival of humanity’s wisdom did not depend on the survival of rulers, but on the survival of readers. The continuity of thought—from the hymns of the Rigveda to the dialogues of Plato, from Dante’s verses to Ghalib’s couplets—was not maintained by brute power, but by those who read, preserved, and passed the words on. To read was never only to acquire knowledge; it was to shape the inner contours of life. A reader was not just a spectator of literature, but its co-creator, allowing words to echo and expand within the recesses of the mind.
Yet the abundance of the digital age has brought with it a strange famine. We live in a world where millions of books are a click away, and yet the hunger for reading has thinned. Ease has betrayed intensity. What once required devotion—the saving of money for a book, the pilgrimage to a library, the careful hours spent in lamplight—now demands nothing but a flick of the finger. And perhaps it is this very ease that robs us of longing. One who can touch everything desires nothing deeply. The book becomes another file, another tab, another distraction in the endless glut of availability.
The decline is not merely sentimental. It is existential. For writers are not self-born; they are born of reading. The subconscious of every writer is carved and layered by the words once absorbed. Shakespeare’s plays are haunted by Ovid and Plutarch; Milton’s epic breathes the air of Homer and Virgil; the Russian novelists carried the echoes of Scripture and the Greek tragedies. Great writers emerge not from isolation, but from immersion in the great sea of other books. Without deep readers, deep writers cannot exist. If reading collapses into skimming, then writing collapses into ornament—a performance of cleverness without substance, an art stripped of its roots.
Picture a child reading beneath the yellow glow of a solitary lamp. Outside, the world bustles, but within, the child is still. She walks with the characters, breathes their sorrows, imagines worlds beyond her own. The act teaches her patience, endurance, and empathy—the very skills that will one day allow her to write not just with grammar but with soul. Now place her instead before a screen. Notifications intrude, links beckon, images flicker. She may still follow the storyline, but her imagination is fractured into fragments. Her reading is no longer immersion but interruption. Tomorrow she may write, but will her writing have depth? She may have language, but will it carry that subterranean power which only arises from stillness?
This is the true tragedy of the vanishing reader—not that books themselves will die, for books will never die—but that the art of inner absorption, the ability to dwell with words in silence, may erode. Literature does not survive on printing presses alone; it survives on readers who read as though their own lives depend on it. Without them, writers become monologists speaking into empty halls, their voices echoing without answer.
Every golden age of literature has been an age of readers. The Romantic poets drank deep from Milton, Dante, and classical mythology. Virginia Woolf absorbed Shakespeare and Sophocles until they sang through her sentences. Even modern experimentalists—Joyce, Borges, Calvino—were shaped by libraries, not by screens. Without a chain of deep reading, literature risks becoming an art without ancestry.
Yet one must be fair: the digital world has also democratized reading. A peasant in a village can now access texts once confined to great universities. Lost manuscripts are reborn as PDFs, classics are offered freely to anyone who desires them. This is no small achievement. But abundance without depth is nourishment without digestion. Just as food cannot nourish unless it is absorbed, books cannot transform unless they are read with patience. Skimming a hundred texts will not equal the weight of living with one. Poetry in particular, which demands slowness and silence, suffocates in the haste of scrolling. A haiku requires a pause; a sonnet demands stillness; an epic insists on long companionship. Without that stillness, the magic dissolves.
It is tempting to blame technology alone, but the truer culprit is the culture of speed that surrounds it. To read on a screen is not inherently shallow; what is shallow is the refusal to resist distraction. The true reader may still use a tablet but will read with the same devotion as with paper. The question is: how many possess such discipline? And what kind of world is being raised when brevity is rewarded over depth, noise over silence, velocity over reflection?
If we lose deep reading, we do not merely lose books—we lose a dimension of human consciousness. For reading is not only about stories; it is about shaping the imagination, training empathy, expanding the self beyond its immediate confines. A society without deep readers becomes a society of fragments, clever in bursts but poor in vision. It may produce entertainers but not prophets, content-makers but not poets, journalists of sensation but not novelists of truth.
And yet, one must not surrender to despair. For passion is a strange creature: once awakened, it rarely dies. Even today, amidst the neon glow of endless screens, there are young souls wandering into second-hand bookstores, inhaling the scent of yellowed pages, discovering handwritten notes in margins left by strangers long gone. Perhaps it is loss itself that will ignite longing. Perhaps the famine of distraction will, one day, drive us back to the feast of books. The book waits, patient as eternity. A reader who once knew its intimacy may wander far, but eventually, tired of restlessness, he will return. And when he returns, the book will open without reproach, as though it had been waiting all along.
This is why one must not say the lamp of reading is extinguished. It flickers, yes, threatened by the winds of distraction, but a flame is not a flame unless it trembles. And as long as there are hands to shield it, as long as there are hearts that seek meaning more than amusement, the flame will endure. Literature has never been for the many; it has always belonged to the few who cherish silence over noise. And it is these few who will carry it forward, who will keep alive the sacred fire of imagination, who will ensure that writers continue to be born from readers, as rivers flow from mountains.
For the act of reading, like prayer, is eternal. Civilizations may crumble, screens may glare, but the lamp of a book in solitude remains what it always was: a quiet flame illuminating the soul. And it is in that flame that all great writing, past and future, is born.
The writer can be reached at sanjaypanditasp@gmail.com
