Friday 19 / April / 2024
‘Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift,’ said Kate DiCamillo, writer of children’s fiction. But unfortunately in the age of gaming, apps, and You Tube, reading a book in a quiet corner seems like an archaic idea for many. With technology taking complete control over our lives, reading habit is gradually declining, especially among children. As we gear up to celebrate World Book Day, a yearly event organised by Unesco on April 23 to pay tribute to books and authors, we meet some ardent book lovers of Oman who are trying their best to rekindle reading habits among children.
Books, for many years, haven’t just been pages put together with hard covers. They have been a separate entity on their own, with the ability to carry the burden of multiple relations and serve varied purposes. There aren’t too many children now who have relationships with books and their characters. However, certain individuals and groups in Oman are trying to cultivate the habit of reading and bring back the culture, which has slowly started dying everywhere.
According to Nuzha Mohamed, the founder of a free and open kids’ book club in Oman, many think people resort to reading when they are depressed or distressed because books help them feel better.
“Once Upon A Time: Muscat” is a noble initiative taken by Nuzha where children and parents are openly invited to the Madinat Al Ilam garden with their favourite books and are encouraged to read out loud to all those who are listening. What started as a small event with Nuzha’s family, friends, and her children, evolved to be an organised event conducted every month with more and more people joining.
On a good day, they have as many as 75 children and parents joining in and reading books. This goes to show how there is still an incessant need for positive habits and a break from technology and apps that people are desperately looking for. It’s just that they have become lazy to create it on their own.
However, Nuzha views books as a way to relate to any form of expression, especially love. She encourages her children to practice reading not just as a habit but also as a way to express whatever they are feeling.
Dar Al Atta’a is another organisation that has been actively reading out to members of the society and organising events and drives to promote the habit of reading, especially among children.
Avid readers across the globe are finding it hard to maintain their reading habits and inadvertently end up blaming their busy schedules without realising they have found convenient alternatives in the form of smartphones and the internet that provide enticing articles such as “The best and worst outfits from the Oscars” or “Top 5 ridiculous Trump tweets” or suggested links based on what we say on social media with not more than five lines to read. The retention rate of people, therefore, keeps going down as we are exposed to such articles; believe it or not, it plays a role in the evolution (or devolution) of the human brain.
When House of Prose, a bookstore in Oman, shut its doors permanently, some people experienced genuine heartbreak, a few others knew they would miss it, while a huge number of “once-loyals” did not even realise it had happened.
Nestled comfortably on the first floor of Al Wadi Centre, House of Prose was a humble bookstore that brought back pleasant childhood memories for many who grew up in Oman.
“Every Tuesday was House of Prose day. I remember how my dad used to take my sister and I there every week and we would spend at least two hours there picking books, and even sitting on the floor and reading. There was this lovely older lady who would offer snacks and suggest interesting books for us to read. House of Prose was such a significant part of my childhood,” remembers 25-year-old Nithin.
Sadly we, as a race, are slowly moving away from the habit of reading because hey, convenience over quality any time, right?
This can clearly be seen by the death of libraries. According to a research conducted by Bangladeshi publication New Age, in a span of 12 years, more than a half of community libraries registered with the National Book Centre, have shut down in the capital, Dhaka. In Oman too, the only bookstore most people know of is Borders, which also sells computer games. The main shortcoming of bookstores you find in malls is the ridiculously high prices.
Thankfully the big book sale arranged by Dar Al Atta’a makes a wide range of books accessible to people at extremely subsidised rates. You can exchange the books you’ve read with the ones you haven’t and even return books and get refunds to buy more books. They have also started a mobile library, which travels to schools, along with festivals and fairs, introducing every child to the enriching world of reading.
But there are still some voracious readers like Siddhant Suri Dhawan, a Grade 12 student, who strongly feels that “those who do not read refined and erudite works miss out on one of the most beautiful aspects of human existence – the ability to live a million lives through the words and imagination of others”. Sharing similar feelings, Tamoghna Dey, another Grade 12 student based in Muscat feels reading a book enriches us in many ways. “A good book is like magic, teleportation in our hands where just at the turn of a page we can jump through time and space into new realms away from our mundane reality,” she says.
Eleven-year-old Freya Bilimoria, who is in Grade 7, says that reading allows her to enter new worlds. “I can imagine these worlds and build my own picture. I can read when friends are busy, when there is nothing else to do and sometimes even when there are other things to do.”
“Revelling in the splendour of the mountains of books that are strewn across my room, my love of reading classic literature has grown into an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that books encapsulate. To me, reading literature is a fine art. It is the skill of going beyond the brown pages of seemingly impenetrable text and plunging into the depths of the minds of the authors that have so mindfully and meticulously crafted them, absorbing and most importantly, cherishing the brilliance they have left behind for us,” adds Siddhant.
Raising concerns on the decline in reading habits Nuzha says that reading has become a chore now. “Most people read either for an exam or to get information they need immediately, she adds. It is more about a collective culture and mindset and keeping young minds away from distractions such as TVs, tabs, smartphones, etc. “Reading is an art that needs to be enjoyed,” says Nuzha, explaining how she didn’t force her kids to read but just introduced them to it.
