Photoblog: Photo #27 - Books

I had been looking for a copy of Fahrenheit 451 at the library here for a while, but, it’s either very popular and hence always in circulation, or the library doesn’t carry it, which would be quite ironical. I finally found it at a bookstore on a recent trip to the US and managed to finish it last week.

It’s a book set in a dystopian world in future where firemen go around burning books. But saying just that about the book would be like saying that 1984 is a book about advances in surveillance technology. Fahrenheit 451 talks of a world where we are so inundated by trivial information that we haven’t any mental space left for critical thought. Books are a proxy for room to think. With a 100 cable TV channels and constant access to flood of trivial information on Facebook, Twitter and other places on the Internet, it’s a world that felt a lot real to me than the dystopian worlds that Orwell imagined. Though, from the recent leaks concerning the various government-funded surveillance programs, it seems that our democratically elected representatives are working hard on fixing that.


Date
August 18, 2013