Reading In My Father’s Time And Now

The changed reading landscape

My father was a high school teacher. This profession is not known for financial abundance. To that he had immense responsibility. A wife, five kids, agricultural costs, barn with cattle, and relatives to maintain.

Despite all this, he always put aside some of his salary for a range of books, magazines and newspaper subscriptions.

Dictionaries, health books, Atlas, novels, religious scriptures, children's books, competitive magazines. We had it all.

Reading material in three languages such as Odia, Hindi and English filled our home library.

Even as a small kid in rural India, I had learned ample exotic words and built a strong general knowledge, due to the corpus of reading materials.

Though money was tight, I never saw my father reading on ‘earning, money making, side hustle, affiliate marketing, etc.’ topics, unlike our peers nowadays!!

He must have felt comfortable with what he used to eke out.

So, when I see reads on anything I write on earning, but no attention to other topics, it seems desperate to me. Some so-called writers see it as an opportunity for easy bucks and to game the system. People align their writing to be in the grace of SEO. Artificial intelligence-generated articles and images make me nauseous.

I wonder if it's even called writing and reading.

We must be living in a economically-unstable times. Everything is commercialized, even reading-writing.

I have just lost my learning-loving father. I am kind of glad he does not have to endure these complex times, the fallout of unnecessary technologies.

He enjoyed reading from paper reading materials for as long as he lived. He did his crossword puzzles with a pen. He left the ‘join the dots’ riddles for me to have fun.

It’s not only a tribute to my father but an elegy to those beautiful reading days. The days we read for the love of knowledge.