Thou shall not write

This week we celebrated the Book Day. Not a happy note to begin with. A nauseating trend at a global level (more appalling than plagiarism) is what can be called as the `epidemic of book writing’. Like we have more leaders than followers, we have more writers than readers. Earlier we wouldn’t write, now we write too much and the flood need be damned. Authorship is not a bandwagon everyone is tempted to jump on. It rather is a long-cherished ideal which unfortunately has been cheapened beyond measure. 

No one can be barred from writing and no one from getting published, but why add to an unread junk the world is full of. There are people and people. Some serve by writing and some by not writing. Let’s decide which class do we belong to or which way we can serve better. That is certainly not to discourage upcoming writers who learn writing by writing. That is only to make our aspiring authors understand the value of authorship. Books are not bricks to be baked, moulded and cranked out like cut and dry products. A newspaper column is a literature in hurry but a book is a fruit of love and labour. It may sound a bit too bizarre and evidently impracticable to declare needless and useless writing as a punishable offence. Some one puts it short, `release the book, and arrest the author’. Fun apart, but the question is serious. How to restore the authorship its dignity and salvage the genuine talent from what Orwell puts as `the frightening torrent of trash’. We have authors who breed books like rabbits breed their young.  

   

We are amazed at the sheer energy of an author who churns out forty odd books in less than twenty years and each book with a 500-page plus whopper. The speed of publications has not even allowed the editors to edit even the titles properly, not to speak of the content. Archiving is needed, but the question is what to archive? We must be enriched, not encumbered by everyday compilations, documentations, assemblages and assortments. When technology has made us authors in our own right, our academics must not get swayed by the mere ease and abundance. Authorship is a distinction and let it remain a distinction. There is nothing more demeaning for an author to peddle his own book. Spurious publications are like spurious drugs. If the latter infect our body, the former suffocate our soul. 

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