Why should we read books?

Why should we read books?

Let’s go some hundreds of thousands of years back.

There was one village.

A dog was born.

After it grew up, it went in search of food.

It ate some wild vegetables.

One day, there was a forest fire. The dog ran away.

After the fire subsided, the dog came back. The vegetables got cooked in the forest fire.

It found them tastier and nutritious and kept eating them. Few days later, some of it had high bacteria.

The dog ate it and slowly died.

Months later, there was another dog.

After it grew up, it went in search of food.

It ate some wild vegetables.

One day, there was a forest fire. The dog ran away.

After the fire subsided, the dog came back. The vegetables got cooked in the forest fire.

It found them tastier and nutritious and kept eating them. Few days later, some of it had high bacteria.

The dog ate it and slowly died.

Another month later there was another dog.

The same cycle repeated.

Now a human was born at the same time.

After he grew up, he went in search of food.

He ate some wild vegetables.

One day, there was a forest fire. He ran away.

After the fire subsided, he came back. The vegetables got cooked in the forest fire.

He found them tastier and nutritious and kept eating them. Few days later, some of it had high bacteria.

He ate it and slowly died.

But—Before he died, he wrote a book, describing all of these things.

So, after the next human was born, he already knew what fire looked like, what happened when forest fires came, how cooked food kept him less hungry for longer time and why it should not be eaten after some days.

So, he lived longer. During the extra-time he had, he started collecting various things like dry leaves, green stems, stones, water and animal dungs.

And when the fire came, he was prepared. He threw all of this one by one into the fire.

And before he died, he authored the next chapter—dry leaves preserve fire, animal-dung cause slow-burning and water puts out the fire.

And the one that came after him read these two chapters. One day, when he was sitting at the place before the fire came, he noticed a spark from wind pushing the trees against each other. So he took two dry sticks and did the same thing. Voila! There was Fire.

And the one born after him made a lighter.

And the one after this generation made electric stove.

Thus the progression went on.

So since the beginning of time, one major strength humans had was the ability to pass on the preserved information to the next generation.

The next generation didn’t have to go through what the previous generation had gone through for survival. Instead, they could better the earlier tricks and add corollary to it.

The knowledge thus got incremented exponentially with every generation.

And one such storehouse of knowledge is Book.

Books (or writings in any form to be precise). have thus evolved to be powerful record-keepers.

• A normal biology textbook lets you know in an hour how your heart beats, how your reflexes work, plants respire—all of which would take centuries to discover.

• Ancient books—written by people like Homer, Dickens, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Chanakya— give a glimpse of how past was, how people lived and what their lifestyle was.

• Works like ‘The Wall’ show how the night feels in a jail before the day you are going to be hanged —something which you may never get to experience.

Books thus open the window to live many lives, experience many facets and see many worlds by just reading. They save you from going through the author’s experiences and living his life to get the same point.