It’s been a year or more that I picked a book and finished it. I may have started reading several of them in this time, read a few pages or struggled to go up to a hundred and then found something better to do. This newly-acquired inability to read anything longish is irritating at times, because one has to read all those books after all.

I try looking for explanations.

Perhaps, this is happening only to me because I have a thousand things on my mind. A good book gets read by itself; perhaps I have been picking the wrong ones.

But I notice I’m spending more time reading than before -- mostly short articles from newspapers or websites, or Facebook statuses, or Tweets or text messages, often on my cell phone.

And that’s where all distractions are. On the cell phone which is invariably connected with the internet these days.

In a sense, most people around us are all the time reading one thing or the other, and not necessarily books which always was a niche activity.

Whether that makes for a less or more reading culture is yet to be affirmed but there clearly is a collective attention deficit problem that we have brought upon ourselves.

Yes, in times like these when the doctors are too keen to label many adult and children as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), we have voluntarily lent ourselves to the condition -- through our desire to stay connected 24/7.

The writers are already responding to this on the insistence of editors and publishers who are desperately pandering to a distracted reader. Thus, in fiction at least, the pace of the content is faster (art imitates life?) while what we have by way of non-fiction is mostly collections of essays that the reader can choose from.

And yet I can’t read a book cover to cover. The itch to log on, to connect with the world I like, is too tempting I guess.

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Though one itch I have been able to resist with a fair degree of completion is that of electronic media. I have stopped watching television. Well, almost. You can manage the contours of your social media profiles but here there is no choice. You watch one channel and you’ve watched them all.

So I only got to read about the ‘dance party’ organised by the nursing staff of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Lahore (actually a farewell party for an outgoing head nurse) in the next day’s newspapers.

The response had been swift. The headlines were all about the Medical Superintendent (MS) being suspended by none other than, wait, the chief minister. Not only was the MS a witness to the ‘obscenity’, he was an active participant by choosing to sing a song.

I was told the chief minister was forced to take action in the face of the media hype about the ‘dance party’ after the video of the farewell was leaked to a TV channel.

I tried watching the ‘dance party’ clips on the internet. To my utter shock, I found another clip, from the following day I guess. The news readers were now criticising the Health Department or the chief minister for taking action against the MS Ganga Ram Hospital when newborns at Mayo Hospital were dying in the absence of enough ventilators.

God help us all!