The last time I was at the Delhi airport, I decided to people-watch. What kinds of things did groups, couples and families do now, as they waited for a flight? I needn’t have bothered. Everyone was on their phones. On a recent long-distance train journey, it was the same.
I confess, I felt a pang.
I thought back to even 20 years ago, when people would hurry to the railway platform bookstall, with its fragrance of fresh paper, to buy a small pile of magazines and paperbacks before their train arrived. I would invariably pick up (guilt-free, since you were allowed to read frivolous stuff on train journeys) film magazines and at least a couple of thrillers. Other, more serious-minded passengers would buy newspapers and newsmagazines.
On the train, everyone would freely borrow each other’s purchases. (Incidentally, I never saw anyone buy the books on palmistry that the bookstalls were so fond of stocking.)
How else was one supposed to spend one’s time on a train? You could look out of the window at the passing countryside, chat with fellow passengers, eat the food brought from home or buy delicious snacks at different railway stations. That still left many hours unaccounted for. Reading filled those hours.
Who can forget Sharmila Tagore in Aradhana (1969), sitting in a window seat of the picturesque Darjeeling toy train, reading the thriller When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean. If her attention wanders a fair bit, who can blame her? Right alongside is a handsome Rajesh Khanna, in an open jeep, singing Mere Sapnon ki Rani Kab Aayegi Tu. (In an aside, only Sharmila Tagore could look so coy while reading a book about ships and pirates!)
The reading-on-a-train scene I like best is from Gulzar’s 1982 comedy Angoor (based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors). Sanjeev Kumar is in an old-fashioned wood-panelled coupe, reading a thriller by Ved Prakash Kamboj. The lurid cover features a man in a hat and sunglasses holding a gun; alongside are a grinning skull and, of course, a pretty damsel.
As Kumar reads a nail-biting section in which the hero enters a desolate haveli (we can hear his voice as he proceeds), his knotted brows and wide eyes reveal his intense engagement. When someone places a hand on his shoulder, he nearly jumps out of his skin. His fondness for such novels becomes a key plot point, as he now believes everyone he encounters belongs to a sinister gang.
Aside from trains and planes, we also read when we were “captive” in other spaces, such as doctors’ waiting rooms or at the hairdresser. There were always dog-eared copies of old magazines lying about, and everyone flipped through them, even if a bit desultorily. I’ve read every kind of periodical in doctors’ waiting rooms, from “women’s magazines” and film magazines to the rather dull ones issued by certain embassies and foreign cultural centres.
There are those who say that this too amounted to a waste of time. There are even some who argue that our phones represent an improvement, since they offer access to literal worlds of information. I’m not on board with this idea. I think we read more before. Without things coming at us all the time, we were less prone to shrillness and hysteria. It wasn’t a perfect world, but it was a softer and less impersonal one, and I still miss that.
(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email poonamsaxena3555@gmail.com.The views expressed are personal)
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