Book lovers unite!

Let’s invert the myth that all good readers keep books in a pristine, antiseptic and haloed condition.

Most of us have been brought up to respect books. Or better still, Respect Books. This includes, not just respecting the knowledge/information/understanding contained in a book, but also treating the actual object with much reverence, particularly never touching a book with your feet, a uniquely Indian and great concept. Of course, in those times, one must remember, you didn’t have books that you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, forget with your feet! (Today, they’re everywhere, even prescribed for BA English students – prompting some of us to exclaim: "Prescribed text? My foot!")

The other injunctions about books that we grew up with: never ever mark on a book with a pencil or pen, never fold corners of pages, always use a bookmark, never lay the book face down, never read while eating…So ingrained were these warnings and lessons, that when you borrowed a book from the library and found someone had underlined sentences, or put little exclamation marks on the side, or scribbled in the book, and obviously not used a bookmark, you thought to yourself, with great disapproval (and in the school-marmish jargon your teachers brought you up on): "Speaks of this person’s Character".

Books that one borrowed from circulating libraries sometimes had all kinds of things boldly scrawled on them. A favourite was: ‘Want to know my name? Go to page 9’. On page 9, you were sent ahead on this search to page 23, and so on and so forth. Till on the last mentioned page, this wag ended with: ‘Mind Your Own Business’ – the ultimate put-down of the ‘seventies.

The first time that I encountered this, it was as heady as (later) meeting someone who smoked more than nicotine sitting right there in Vaishali. Here was a total rebel - scribbling with sketch pen on a Book, and drawing you into a treasure hunt that ended in a smart slap in the face. Subversion couldn’t get better than this, at the age of 12. It had to be tried out. On the next Nancy Drew book that we borrowed from the school library, three conspirators got together and pulled the same lark – only, writing in pencil, simply not daring enough to work with pen. As for the final ‘Mind Your Own Business’, we wrote it in the tiniest of tiny handwriting, so that the reader had to squint hard and hold the page to the light to decipher the words. It created major ripples and became a Topic for Assembly. The perpetrators were labeled Uncouth, Disrespectful and Most Likely to Fail in Life. We arranged our faces to look suitably shocked too. It was the year of living dangerously. We never repeated that lark again, and after a while it seemed a fairly silly and sick thing to do.

Having said that, however, many books and many years later, a case has to be made, in fact, for scribbling in books – your own books, that is. Sometimes you read a great book, the kind which makes you stop mid-read and take a long walk, or take many long breaths, the kind which gives you an ahaa moment, the kind that opens doors, touches chords. That is when I am sorely tempted to mark a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, scribble some of my reactions to it, and if there’s no bookmark at hand, turn in the corner of the page, so that I can return to that part of the book some hours, days, weeks, even years later. And this is in no way disrespectful of the book, its contents or its author, I have come to the conclusion. It is, for me, a celebration of a literary moment – when writer and reader connect, across centuries, across continents, in a recognition of some universal truth.

Now freed from the notion that people who mark books are enemies of various goddesses of learning, I love borrowing and reading books that are well-thumbed and similarly marked by other people. It gives you pause to think and wonder at what struck the previous reader, drawing one more person into your relationship with the book, a kind of silent and virtual book club.

A note of caution, though: I recently met a rather opinionated person who talked loudly about a famous 19th century psychologist, dismissing his entire body of work, saying: "He’d got it all wrong, he completely missed the point. He knew nothing about human behaviour. And I have written this in my book." "You’ve written these opinions about him in a book?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. And striding to his bookshelf, he pulled out the autobiography of the great man, opened it to a page he’d marked (by turning in the corner) and jabbed at the margin. Here he had scribbled in red pen: "He is ignorant and wrong!!"

That’s not quite what one means by writing in your book!

However, I would still strongly defend and support the impulse to scribble on (your own) books. While you may have been brought up to believe that it is a heinous crime to make any mark on a printed book, do try it the next time you read something that touches you deeply and you want to frame the feeling that the words set off in you. Even a faint little line in the margin is a good starting point. From there, you can graduate to underlining parts, and thence to scribbling little keywords, phrases, that record your specific reaction to the passage that you have read. Believe me, the writer, dead or alive, will be honoured to know that somewhere, a reader is connecting so well with his/her work.

Whatever you were brought up to believe, putting markings on a book is really not the same thing as scratching a heart and an arrow and Rahul loves Shweta on the Taj Mahal (the monument, not the hotel).