In hindsight, this was the most important advice I got as a child. Read everything. Newspaper. Books. Textbook. Children’s magazines. Even the paper which the shopkeeper uses to wrap vegetables in.
I followed it religiously for most of my life.
I used to wake up and read the whole newspaper from first page to last. I would read every sentence in my textbooks. I would finish all the books I started. And I would subscribe to every blog I liked on Google Reader and read each post from them.
One could argue whether this advice is sound. Even for myself it became impractical as the amount of text around me grew. I couldn’t read all sentences of the medical college textbooks (mostly because I was busy doing many other things). There was an explosion of blogs on the internet. While I used to read every message in every WhatsApp group I was in, I found this also to drain a lot of my time.
But all the while, I’ve been noticing one pattern. There are people who do not read. And they land up in all kinds of trouble.
This is starkly visible in navigating websites. You can put all the warnings and give people all kind of preparation on what to do on a website. But they’ll still go “I couldn’t figure out how to do this”.
I used to assume this was a problem with “tech literacy”. That people were afraid of technology, and they didn’t bother to lovingly explore.
But I’m beginning to form an alternate hypothesis. People are having difficulty with technology because they don’t read!
They don’t read the description written under a checkbox. They don’t read the warning messages that they’re pressing “OK” to. They don’t read instructions in an email. They read nothing.
And there could be many reasons why people don’t read. Some people don’t know how to read. Some people have not developed reading fluency to be able to quickly read a sentence or a paragraph. Walls of text are scary for some. This post is not about criticizing people.
This post is about opening up a potential. If people could read, they could
- learn about things on their own
- verify facts by themselves
- operate independently
- gain wisdom from umpteen number of books
There is so much written online about topics like gender and caste it genuinely surprises me how people are eager to “unlearn and relearn” in any online courses. Hello? Why did you not unlearn stuff till 2025?
But now I think their problem could be that they are not used to reading.