Habitually turning to the printed word, instead of devices, to unwind, is a powerful method to resist the colonisation of our collective consciousness as well as rejuvenate the body and mind
By scrolling over our touchscreen phones, we renege on the simplicity of turning a page. Representation Pic/istock
I often wonder if I’m a bit too severe about my insistence on a screen-free home. We have a television, but it’s rarely turned on. Perhaps because we intentionally placed it in our guest bedroom, which doubles as my workroom and currently serves as the sleep quarters for me and our newborn. We didn’t want our living room organised around a large flat screen.
In the early days when the five-month-old was a tiny potato whose only goals in life were to feed, poop, and sleep, it was easy to turn to Netflix to distract oneself from the laborious nature of breastfeeding. This was how I ended up watching all six seasons of Parenthood. But the moment I noticed him steadily coming to life, growing in awareness of his surroundings, I stopped watching for leisure. I wanted to focus, instead, on cultivating his faculties for observation and attention. I don’t want these to be numbed through over-exposure to the dopamine thrill that screens readily offer.
Funnily enough, I rediscovered my own threshold when it came to my consumption of social media. I gave up on Twitter years ago. I browse through Facebook for ten minutes a day. I cannot handle more than 10 minutes of reels. My brain very quickly feels like it will begin to rot. My mind and body begin craving intellectual stimulation — the kind one accesses through the critical faculties required to digest the written word. I have re-committed myself to the thrill of learning something new and building upon my existing critical faculties. Not from a space of lack or insecurity about not knowing enough, but from the realm of joy. I am not driven by the desire to know more so that I can feel smarter or even be empowered, but for the unadulterated pleasure of taking in the ingenuity of a concept or a literary turn of phrase or to expose myself to a powerful articulation of a lingering thought. Sometimes, I am excited to see how someone else has approached an idea that I have also had, even if their manner is not aligned with my methods.
It’s safe to say there is a reading crisis not only in India but in many parts of the world. However, unlike many other countries where there are clear regulations around work culture to protect employees from abuse, in India, everyone does unpaid overtime without ever quite agreeing to it. It means that, whether we accept it or not, most Indians, especially younger people in the workforce between the ages of 25 and 50, are constantly experiencing burnout. While people’s incomes seem to have increased, their quality of life seems to have plummeted radically. Our time gets swallowed by endlessly prolonged commutes. Within the stress and the bustle of subservient work environments, it is temptingly easy to just switch off by dissolving into our screens. By the time you get home, you want to ‘check out’ mentally, so you invariably consume media that is effortlessly distracting, easy to digest and demands little to no critical thinking. Enter screens.
The ease with which one can order a meal in most Indian cities means that in the after-work hours, you don’t even need to cut a lemon. We have unknowingly given up the pleasures of tactility. By no longer cooking, we have lost the possibility of contact with ingredients that come from the soil. By scrolling over our touchscreen phones, we renege on the simplicity of turning a page. The convenience economy — which is typically built on the back of exploitation — robs us of the immediacy of tangible contact with anything that feels too messy or time-consuming. The easy availability of labour allows us to outsource anything that demands more from our bodies than our bodies can provide.
These are among the manifold reasons I cannot recommend enough to anyone reading this to resist the colonisation of our collective minds through radical reading. This means adopting reading not as an exercise in practising literacy but inculcating it as part of your everyday — even if only in small doses. You may look at a book and think it’s 300 pages long — who has the time? — but if you commit to ten pages a day, you’ll find it easier to accomplish. In this moment in time, when it’s so easy to turn to AI to get a synopsis of a text, there’s something revolutionary about trudging through the words yourself, sitting in the midst of someone else’s consciousness and labour. Time slows down, and your body breathes differently because it has to be more active. The high you get from a great plot twist or an impeccably written sentence or a joke nestled within the spine of a humorous book is something else entirely. Also, the physical act of turning a page offers a sense of satisfaction like no other. And if, like me, you curl up with a book at night instead of doomscrolling on your phone, the sleep you get after is indeed delicious and rejuvenating — an instant remedy for anxiety, a way to help you return to your body and mind.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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