Books are our emotions and we must keep them alive
Nowadays we hear a saying that books are slowly disappearing from people’s lives. We see everywhere people with mobiles in bus, train seems like they are lost in the mobile world. Perhaps we are far behind the time when we cannot imagine that any person would have a book in his hand. I still remember my home was about twenty kilometers away from my college and I had to travel most of the way by bus. This book was my companion on the bus at that time. Not only in the bus but whenever I got free time I spent time with books. I had a strange addiction to books, which gave me a lot of pleasure at that time. At that time I had read most of the works of Rabindranath and Saratchandra and I was so engrossed that I could not understand anything even after spending hours in these books. It hurts to remember those days. There was a library near our school from which we used to get books but now that library is also closed. What was known as the reason for the closure of the library was that the number of readers was very low i.e. at one time not even a single reader could be found so the government was forced to close the library. A time when readers were desperate to go to the library now that there is not a single reader to go there makes our chest tremble. This library was once our emotion, for us it was equivalent to a temple but now people don’t want to go here. So one library after another is going to close, maybe a day will come when the library will cease to exist.
Despite all this, there are still a small number of people alive who still love books equally. For all these people it’s still nice to feel like I’m not alone and there are still a few people like me who are crazy about books. In a private company I work with, an employee was identified a few days ago for the crime of reading books during duty hours. Although it was stated by the employee that when he gets free time he reads books and he does not neglects work and read books. When the matter went to the other company we might have thought that some action would be taken against the worker but no action was taken against him. In fact, what we understood was that the company’s higher-ups took this positively because it was a pleasure for them to think that a person spends time with a book where people spend hours on their phones these days. When I personally asked my Kali what religious books he likes to read, he said that various novels written by Rabindranath Saratchandra were his favorite, and he told me about several novels that I had never heard of. Besides, I took many books from him and later returned them. Even now I get many books from him and when I spend time reading books I feel like I have gone back to my past life.
Information technology is bringing changes in our life one after another due to which there are many changes in people’s lives. As a result of this, as many things are being lost from our lives as we are benefiting from it. There was a time when we used to see two strangers talking to each other fluently but now we don’t even see two acquaintances talking to each other because they are busy on their own phones. That emotion in humans no longer works as much as we saw in childhood as humans are rapidly changing towards machines. At one time my father used to socialize openly with all the family members in his spare time. At that time, he used to forbid us not to use headphones, but nowadays, with the change in information technology, he has also changed, so he spends hours on the phone with headphones in his ears. He no longer has free time. If this continues, the book will one day be placed in a museum and future generations will know that this is how their ancestors were once educated. I don’t know how long the few people like us who still love books will be able to sustain the book because with the change of time the number of people like us is gradually decreasing but we will try our best to revive the book in people’s life. Still we will try our best and request some of the present generation to stand by us because it was through this book that the whole world once saw the light of education, so to throw it away in the garbage might be considered a great sin in their generation too.
