Crass commercialism seems to be taking over at Dhaka's Aziz Market. What used to be a place for books, for good conversation, could soon be a thing of the past, forced out by boutiques and beauty parlours. Ask any bookshop owner there. They will tell you they cannot cope with any more increases in rent. The boutiques and the parlours can, of course. And there's the rub. Your reading is going down. And now it is the bookstores that are an endangered species. But let us talk of reading, for now.
You wonder at times about the state of reading in the world you are part of. There is the sense that it is dying, that indeed these increasing levels of sophistication coming into technology are in essence putting holes into our old habits of reading. Not many people read today, which is a pity. Worse is the knowledge that bookstores are being downsized because business is not good. And what you have in place of these truncated, eventually murdered bookstores is storehouses of all those things that reflect the decline of intellect in our times. Visit any bookshop in Dhaka. Chances are it will be empty or perhaps a visitor or two will be there. Those of you who might be tempted to visit the bookstores at Aziz Market in Shahbagh too cannot boast of high visitor numbers, though you have some of the best books, newly published, to be had in the shops there. The old shops in New Market are yet there, but there is something about the arrangement of the books on the shelves, together with the narrow space in the shops, that is pretty disquieting. The stores that specialise in English language works, of course brought in from abroad, today offer hardly anything that shows light at the end of the tunnel. Besides, there are the prohibitive prices to consider. Omni at Dhanmondi has seen its book section confined to an increasingly narrow space. Et Cetera started off well. It is only the past about it you recall now. Words N' Pages, in Gulshan, is yet out there. Will it stay that way? At the old airport in Tejgaon, The Bookworm remains a beacon of happiness. How much longer will the lights gleam?
Time was when reading formed part of life in Bangladesh. It was especially the middle classes that cultivated the habit of reading. Nearly every member of the family would be holding a book; and homes, beginning with the drawing room, would be a delight because of the books and journals that met the eye. In the early 1960s, back in those black and white days, men with large baskets perched on their heads would come bearing works of fiction and journals that our mothers' generation would spend a whole week waiting for. Recall if you will the frenzy with which these women pounced upon such magazines as Begum and then devoured them even as they cooked lunch and bathed their children. Their men never missed reading the newspaper. And, to be sure, there were the novels and sometimes the works on poetry they were always laying their hands on. Their school-going children, forbidden to neglect their studies in favour of fiction, nevertheless found time to smuggle books into bed and read them by the light of flickering candles. It happened in the towns. And it was happening in the villages. But of one thing there was hardly any doubt: everyone wanted to read.
There are the authors you can cite with ease. Tagore and Nazrul were there, as encouragingly permanent fixtures. But there were also Manik Bandhopadhyaya, Michael Madhushudhan Dutta, Jibanananda Das, Mir Mosharraf Hossain, Tarashankar Bandhopadhyaya, Bishnu De and so many others. Buddhadev Basu drew readers by the scores. Maitreyi Devi was a gem of a writer. In the movies produced in what was then East Pakistan, it was not uncommon for the leading men in them to be portrayed as bright, intelligent students at college or university, often weighed down by a load of books in hand. The beautiful women they courted were often spotted reading in bed before breaking into hauntingly charming love songs. The culture of reading was all. It was a common sight coming across young men in the villages reading well-known works of fiction and discussing their discoveries amongst themselves. In the early 1970s, poets like Shamsur Rahman, Rafiq Azad, Abul Hasan, Shihab Sarkar, Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah, Nirmalendu Goon and Mahadev Saha were the craze. Poetry was evolving into its post-modernist mode and everyone wanted to be part of it.
That is, or was, the legacy. You are, given the desolation all around you, today tempted to ask if reading cannot be revived in this land where the Ekushey book fair is endlessly a reinvention of the national soul. Yes, there are yet the symbols of hope --- the Jatiyo Grantha Kendra, the Bangla Academy, Shahitya Prokash, Adorn Publication, Pathak Shamabesh, Papyrus, Ekushe, Prothoma --- for us to build on. Bishwa Shahitya Kendra, with its soul-uplifting mobile library programme, is an instance that could be replicated by others.
And then there is television with all those channels out there. They appear to be popularising everything, from politics to agriculture to music to talk shows. We have no problem with that. But the question remains: how many programmes are there on that ubiquity of television channels that cater to books, to reading? There are nations that are privy to book discussions on television, to authors talking about their works. Surely similar discussions for an hour so every week can be injected into the television schedules in Bangladesh? There are newspapers, Bengali as well as English, which come up with weekly reviews of books. It would not be a bad idea calling in reviewers and bringing them in touch with readers through the medium of television and radio.
There are rivers that nourish the land. And books nurture the soul. Need one say more? Ah, here's a spot of good news from my friend Shona. She tells me that in Shantinagar a good library-cum-bookstore, replete with arrangements for coffee and an ambience for exercises of the mind, has come up. Perhaps all is not lost yet?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Star Literature and Star Books Review.