Mind the gap. Gift me a book, stranger

So, last December, prompted by my friend Aditi Sengupta, I signed up in her book chain — on Facebook. It sounded lovely — getting books as gifts from people we may not know at all, felt really thrilling. It brought back memories of school, when we would sometimes leave our lunch boxes on a table and pick one at random, to be pleasantly submerged in the excitement of choosing blind and in the pure happiness of sharing. Indeed, perhaps that is how I first encountered what the Buddha called Mudita — the delight from seeing another thrive, the joy of letting selfishness go. We were all so thrilled to find out what the other had got, getting an uninspiringly dry and tasteless bread-and-butter sandwich was always compensated by sharing the joy of another who managed to pick a packet of biriyani! I was going to send Aditi a book, and I would want to gift her only the work of an author I truly loved, and that was KR Meera. So it didn’t bother me at all that I would not, for sure, get the maximum one was likely to get — namely, 36 books. Even a single book would have made my new year.

But many of my offline friends reacted with horror at the very suggestion. Some said it was illegal, in fact criminal, a pyramidal Ponzi scheme. Some sat on their moral high horses and declared that it was low to get strangers to send you things. Others tried to scare me by saying that sharing personal details on Facebook is a big risk. I kid you not, soon there was a post circulating on Facebook and WhatsApp warning people about the grave dangers to society posed by the book chain. Though initially rattled, and made to feel guilty for wanting to promote, and expect, generosity, I persisted. I was not convinced by the comparison with the Ponzi scheme, because this is not one in which the person on top keeps on making gains tier after tier. In my mind, this was a chance to meet up with others, make new friends, perhaps. The fear of strangers irritated me — the very idea that one should avoid all encounters with strangers is acceptable only in a pathologically protectionist society. That it seems normal in our insane times does not mean that it is good. As for my address and other details, those are not exactly unavailable. Haters don’t need book chains to get to you.

I am so glad I persisted. Not because I did, indeed, get close to 36 books, but I actually made new friends. A wonderful young woman decided to just bring me a book; thoroughly pleased, I plied her with home-baked lemon squares. Another lovely lady, who had sent me a book that I was dying to read, called up to say that she was planning to visit Kerala and whether I could help her plan the trip. I was only too glad, and she was my guest too. I made sure she did not leave our shores without tasting our divine beef-coconut-shallots dry-fry and appams, and other such contributions of the Malayali people to civilisation. But best of all, I received love letters. For someone knocking at the door of 50 and generally known in her immediate environs as a unakkasastrikal , or a desiccated-in-the-head, this was really a lovely New Year gift. None of them signed. Wise people: they know that love heals best when it is un-graspable and untamed, like a whiff of fragrance wafting from the mysterious and unseen wild.

The resistance to joining the book chain is a curious kind of disorder. Not that all my friends were equally blessed. Poor Meera was deluged with books written by Malayalam authors of decidedly dubious merit. I even think her fans may have taken this as a chance to get her to notice them. Some younger people who participated did not get any books, but their friends are not reading enthusiasts anyway. And that it was a young, enthusiastic student of neoclassical economics who advanced soul-withering criticism of anything that involves human trust in strangers did not surprise me. I cannot figure out what we gain from the kind of education that actually erodes our capacity to be social beings. The instant rejection — the recoiling that I noticed in many, at the very mention of the idea — is scary. Not only is it driven by the urge to protect oneself from potentially hostile strangers, it also treats generosity as mostly pointless. So, in sum, through Aditi’s invitation I opened myself up this New Year to the a-tithi , or one ‘who has no fixed day for coming’.

J Devika

J Devika is a historian and critic based in Thiruvananthapuram

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