n the early days of November 2022, a short video of a girl dancing to Lata Mangeshkar’s song Mera Dil Yeh Pukaray Aa Ja (Come, begs my heart) at a Pakistani wedding went viral on social media on both sides of the border in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Within a couple of weeks, informal news media reported that the girl had made a fortune out of the video. This resulted in a trend of posts that compared and contrasted unemployed PhDs with the viral girl whose single thumka (twerking) had earned her “twenty million rupees.” People also commented that it was useless to read books in the age of TikTok. The episode reminded me of an Urdu verse by an Indian poet, Bashir Badr, that I had recently read somewhere:

“The bookworms got crushed under the weight of paper/ The crazy made a name without even attending school.”

What other poets and writers think about books and reading today was the question that came to mind immediately. Readers of Urdu literature from South Asia know that the book has been either romanticised as a friend, a joyful company, a messenger of love, a valuable possession, an item of luxury etc; or used as a metaphor to represent beauty, peace and warmth – all things beautiful. For instance, Iftikhar Arif’s poem, Mohabbat Ki Ek Nazm (a love poem), lists book at the top of the only four things the poet has and which he cherishes the most:

“I only have a book, a lamp/ a dream, and you”

At another point, Arif declares his book as one of his true assets and sees everything else as a lie:

“A lamp and a book and a hope are assets/ All else is fiction”

The following verse by Anjum Rehbar highlights how the book serves as a messenger between secret lovers:

“A dear friend of mine, in a book yesterday/ was hiding a letter, when I began missing you”

Ghulam Muhammad Qasir views books as playing an even more significant role as he wants them to replace gunpowder:

“How great it would be to have access to books instead of gunpowder;/ How nice it would be for nth dream revealed to our eyes to be a peaceful one.”

Similarly, Mahfooz Mohammad’s metonymical use of the book theorises it as a peacemaker and its readers as peace lovers:

“They have sent us a summons to engage in a battle/ We will send them a book of ghazals”

Sprawling book stacks of libraries of the world are now condensed into electronic gadgets that are even smaller in size than standard book volumes.

In Urdu poetry, the book also stands as a metaphor for beauty. Nami Ansari compares the beauty of his beloved’s locks to a ghazal and her face to a book:

“It’s the same pleasant scene that I see in print, among colours/ A lock of her hair that is [enchanting] like a ghazal and her face, which resembles a book”

Arshad Mahmood Nashad’s Kitab Nama is a narrative poem with the book, its narrator and the subject. This book-length work showcases the book’s accomplishments since times immemorial. It convincingly establishes that it is a heavenly being and gives its readers a delightful tour through the ages and places, introducing them to great writers, poets, philosophers, scribes and calligraphers that the book-narrator takes pride in. It also warns us about indifference towards books and suggests that a book is to live on as its Creator wants it.

The present generation’s indifference is probably due to their lack of time to read books, or at least this is what Meraj Muhammad Faizabadi thinks, as he states in one of his Urdu verses:

“They don’t have time to face problems/ Give this generation abstracts, not books”

Faizabadi hints at a shortage of time as the pace of life has sped up while books are meant to slow us down. Nasir Abbas Nayyar suggests shorter, quicker versions of books in his dystopian short story Qissa Kitabun kay Qabaristan ka (A tale of the graveyard of books) included in his collection Aik Zamana Khatm hua (An era comes to its end). In this story, a man declares that most books are dead. So, he decides to build a graveyard for them. As he does so, he also makes sure that every book has a gravestone that carries the book’s essence, extracted by a three-member committee of experts. The existence of this brevity graveyard, despite its dark image, means that books can still be relevant albeit in a time-efficient way.

Leah Price, in her optimistic article, Dead Again, published in The New York Times on August 12, 2012, cites French visionary Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740–1814), who predicted long ago that “in the year 2440, the sprawling book stacks of the Royal Library would be condensed into a single volume. Like a chemist distilling botanical essences, Mercier explained, editors of the future would “extract the substance of thousands of volumes, which they have included in a small duodecimo”. This is pretty much like Nayyar’s suggestion. Unfortunately, although sprawling book stacks of libraries of the world are now condensed into electronic gadgets that are even smaller in size than standard book volumes, we cannot yet extract the substance of thousands of volumes like a chemist does.

Does this mean that to survive the age of AI, writers and editors will have to create books as effective as distilled chemicals and as short as Facebook reels? If not writers and editors, the AI models like ChatGPT will do it, and for that, it doesn’t look like we will have to wait until 2440. These BookToks or TikBooks, however, will only be meant for popular consumption as there will always be people who crave real and solid food as opposed to extracts.

On a sabbatical from the International Islamic University Islamabad, the writer is currently a visiting professor at McGill University. He is the author of Sasa, a novel in Urdu. He tweets @SheerazDasti