No burning or banning can suppress human mind: PM

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, FEB. 5. ``Neither burning nor banning has been able to suppress the human mind,'' said the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, while inaugurating the 14th World Book Fair at Pragati Maidan here this morning.

``The power of knowledge, of ideas, of imagination has always scared those whose strength derives from bigotry and fundamentalism... We have seen books being banned and authors persecuted....but ideas have survived, new ideas are being born, and the quest for knowledge continues'' he said.

Affirming that books are like windows that open up to the limitless world of knowledge, the Prime Minister sought to show how throughout human history books have proved to be more powerful than weapons of death and destruction. Such being the power of books, the ``poet-statesman'' - as he was described by an earlier speaker - maintained that the printed word would survive the onslaught of time and technology.

Bringing up the apprehension about books becoming extinct in this age of the electronic word and pondering aloud whether libraries would disappear ``and leave us with formless digital volumes that will exist in the netherworld of cyber space'', Mr. Vajpayee said the printed books would survive the cyber age. He advised the book industry to draw courage from the way the print media had survived the advent of television.

But he also had a word of caution for publishers and said they had an important role to play in ensuring survival of books. ``Books have to be made affordable so that individual buyers are not constrained by the price line.'' Acknowledging the fact that spiralling printing costs had made books dearer, Mr. Vajpayee urged people to strengthen the system of public libraries to deal with this problem.

While advocating establishment of public libraries, the Prime Minister made it clear that it should be a people's initiative as has been successfully experimented in West Bengal. ``Do not look forward to official patronage for setting up huge libraries that invariably become unwieldy and inaccessible to the masses.''

Earlier, the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, urged publishers to invest more in books written in Indian languages. Speaking in chaste Hindi, the Minister lamented the fact that despite people writing in vernacular media, few of these works saw the light of day. And when they do, only a limited number of prints are brought out.

Dr. Joshi stressed the need to take books to the common man, particularly to the villages to build a book culture in the country. He said parents and teachers were equally responsible for cultivating the reading habit among children.

Prof. Milton Israel hoped that the future would allow people to hold a book and turn its pages without the help of a mouse.

The Chairman of the National Book Trust, Dr. Sitakant Mahapatra who welcomed the gathering said that while technology might change the way books are produced and marketed, they are not going to vanish from any screen as a flitting image because they ``speak to the soul as we go along with them''.

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