MEDIA (THE PAST AND FUTURE OF READING)

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF READING  

By: Nasser Yousaf 

I could not recollect Gulab Khan’s face when once during a brief stopover at his stall he mentioned dropping newspapers at our house in the old days. The time period that Gulab referred to was when we were in our teens, and our interest in the newspapers did not go beyond waiting for the children’s pages. 

There were then about half a dozen old bungalows and perhaps an equal number of shops at Abbottabad’s main business and residential area, which is still known by its old name ‘Mandian.’ 

It was so until the early eighties. There was no gate at the two stone-built pillars to our house, an expansive orchard of plums and an assortment of fruit-trees. Perhaps, a gate or barbed wires were not really needed in those days of quintessential calm. Ligustrum hedges made up the walls and boundary of our landed property. 

There are now several thousand shops and perhaps the same number of houses in the same area. 

It was during that brief idle talk when Gulab Khan wistfully dwelt on the charms of the old times. He had a broken down bicycle but it never failed him perform his duty which would commence at dawn. His nephews now did hawking on their bikes while by dint of years of handwork the elderly man had got himself settled in a shop that still retained its old mud walls and a tin-roof from the day it was constructed decades ago. 

Years had taken their toll and weariness was now written large on Gulab’s somewhat dark complexion. His shoulders had shrivelled but with his elbows placed on the newspapers spread on the wooden shelf, there used to be a smile on his shrunken face that looked ineffaceable. It was thus also with a smile, though sardonic, when one day he informed that the sale of the country’s leading English-language newspapers had suddenly dropped down from 700 to a couple of dozens due to some turmoil in the power corridors. 

Some months after that conversation with Gulab, the elderly hawker’s absence from the stall was found conspicuous. One thought that he might be resting in his village or out on some errand. So one asked his nephew about his uncle’s whereabout in a somewhat nonchalant manner. ‘He has died,’ the younger hawker shot back in a manner that looked only half serious. 

In another decade, or even less, there would be no newspaper hawkers left in Pakistan. There are very few of them left now; and famished to an extent that one could only take pity on their overall bearing. Hawkers of Gulab’s generation were an industry in themselves; they knew the finer points of newspaper reading better than those who sat on their desks in the relative comfort of their offices. They could call out dilettantes merely by looking at their faces, and would have nothing to do with them.  

What one would miss most about those hawkers is the passion that they would exhibit while marketing their products. Even a mundane headline read out loudly by a hawker would draw the attention of the curious observers compelling them to purchase a copy. The evening newspapers, especially, would mostly be dispensed with in this fashion although there would be little to read in it other than the screaming headline. 

Newspaper reading in the good days, which lasted only until the arrival of the age of internet, was an art. One really needed a domestic environment or culture, an experience of some considerable length or in the absence of the two a tutorial to be called an avid reader. Electronic reading has made short shrift of all that. 

One needs not go far to find out why what our newspapers publish, and keep updating round the clock, may not be serious works of writing. To keep their so called readers engaged, and in good humour, nearly all English-language newspapers accept comments on each news item, features and articles and post them in a matter of an hour or so after vetting by the moderators. The less said about the moderators, the better. The quality of most of those comments reveals how non serious the present-day readership tends to be. 

The decline in newspaper reading is not restricted to any one particular country, but in fact it is a universal phenomenon. It would appear that newspapers worldwide have wrought their downfall on themselves by playing to the rules set by a less than serious readership. 

The wonderful age of reading is indeed past. In these difficult times, readers have to be told about the length of time that a particular article would require. People like Robert Fisk, known for his wordy write ups, would not be missed. 

Attack on the Taliban-held Afghanistan was perhaps the last time newspapers were heard doling out dollars on newsmen when hordes of them descended on Peshawar to report war and its ramifications across the border. Since then things have reached such a pass where even some of the world’s leading newspapers could be seen requesting for a one-dollar donation from the online readers to help keep them afloat. 

Such being the financial straits of what once seemed to be the invincible media’s empire, where does a poor hawker stand! Since internet has injected every Tom, Dick and Harry with the power and capacity of being his(her) own reporter and announcer, and what not, future of hawking the newspaper by whatever means is as good as foretold.