In case you have not noticed it, the National Reading Month has been going on for about a month.

You cannot be blamed for not noticing this yet another government campaign to whip Malaysians into shape, on their way to become perfect citizens. There are simply too many of these seemingly irrelevant campaigns to interest anyone pre-occupied with the daily grind of making ends meet and getting through our killer traffic unscathed.

These campaigns are a must for government ministries and agencies for reasons that we understand well. They show that our politicians and civil servants are very busy taking "pro-active", "constructive", and "positive" steps in meeting the needs of the country.

In a nation where activities have replaced achievement as the standard of assessing the success of any official programmes, it is sufficient for the ministries that such campaigns have been launched. How many Malaysian souls will have been touched by this National Reading Month is a matter of not much importance to anybody.

This is our Malaysian way of life. We are not a reading nation.

That is a sweeping statement that requires some qualifications. Malaysians do read I suppose, when they have to, as in schools and universities. There, they have to read what little is prescribed by the educational "authorities" (whoever they are), in order to pass examinations.

Having passed their examinations, they entered the job market. There, those industrious ones will continue to read materials relevant to their trades and professions to get ahead in their careers. For distraction, they may glance through the daily newspapers, and subscribe to the odd magazines.

But most Malaysians would not dream of making their weekly or monthly trip to the nearest bookstore, browse through the shelves, and leave with a purchase or two.

Cultural illiterates

In the modern middle-upper class suburbs of KL and other Malaysian cities, the opulent homes will be filled to the brim with decorative and electrical implements, meant for show and for recreation. God forbids that you should find a well stocked personal library.

When adults show so little interest, can you blame their children for their phobia of books and learning? The killing of the reading habit is a cultural gene, inherited from generation to generation in Malaysia. We have become a nation of cultural illiterates.

At this time, there are bound be those who will throw their arms up in protest. We have the internet, they say. With modern information technology, we can always access cyberspace to get whatever information we want. Books - like the print media - are outdated, doomed to extinction, like the old dinosaurs, they say.

Allow me to be a little extreme. The internet is a perfect tool for creating a universe of cultural illiterates.

Most people use the internet for entertainment purposes anyway. Games and chats are still the most favoured uses of this digital wonder. Most of the internet cafes in my area are still packed with school kids shooting space monsters and scoring football goals with their fingers on the keyboard and joysticks.

Besides, the medium is the message. The fluorescent screen flickering with coloured dots is not suitable for sustained, thoughtful, and hermeneutic communication, though it is perfect for communication and thinking limited to one-liners. In Malaysia, where people's thoughts and speeches are all limited to expressions of one-liners, it is little wonder that they worship the computer as the ultimate temple of knowledge and information.

Lamenting the lack of support for the National Reading Month, a letter writer asked in the NST , "How could we ever successfully become a knowledge society when the campaign has not followed through?"

Whatever a "knowledge society" is, is not so self-evident as the writer thinks. That is subject matter for another treatment elsewhere. But we Malaysians have been socially conditioned to death, to think that every social project can be achieved through mere campaigns alone.

Means to an end

True enough, the reading habit is a virtue. As some thinkers will tell you, any virtue can neither be taught nor legislated. Least of all can it be instilled by publicity campaigns.

There is something horribly wrong with our Malaysian mindset. "Mindset" is a hateful word, but perfectly applicable to our Malaysian context. Malaysian minds have long been used to their being set by the dominant language of the day employed by the political-technocratic-bureaucratic-corporate elite. Their minds have been set to think that all minds can be set, like mechanisms being tuned to pre-determined design.

The fallacious mindset here is to think of the reading habit as a mere tool, a means to an end, and no more, like everything else in life in fact. This curious mindset can best be described as a crude mixture of utilitarianism and pragmatism. According to these philosophies, the value of the reading habit, of books, and of everything in the universe, is measured in terms of how it can be useful, and how it can further the happiness of the individual.

Another possibility exists.

People do not always read and write just because it makes them happy, or because writing and reading are useful skills. Reading and writing are uniquely human activities. They make us what and who we are.

Legend has it that when the written language was invented in China some 5000 years ago, "The heaven and earth were rattled, and the gods and spirits wept". In ancient civilisations everywhere in the world, the appearance of the written word was accorded religious significance, and treated with the sort of reverence reserved for divine miracles.

Eventually, our humanness is defined by our language. The magic of our interaction with our language is still not fully comprehended. We know it can do great good, and it can also kill more effectively than the most advanced firearms. The written word has a mystery entirely its own.

When a writer sets out to write, creating a series of ordered symbols and scratches on paper, they are perhaps merely imitating the act of divine creation. From nothing, or chaos, they produce an order of meaning.

The act of writing down sentences and propositions immediately separates man from beast, and unfortunately, separates man from god also. It also distinguishes what is true, and what is not true. Above all, it truncates Being from mere existence.

When another person reads the writing of this writer, perhaps a few thousand years apart and half a globe away, the reader enters into a living relationship with the author. During that one instant, the chasms of space and time are bridged, and two disparate horizons are conjoined in a convivial celebration of common humanity. Like two stones brought violently together, sparks fly, to illuminate the darkness of man's cosmic loneliness.

Every act of reading is an act of interpretation. The text is not the book alone, but what the book tries to reveal through the written words. If living a life in its quintessential sense is like groping around a lit clearing in the darkness of the forest of our common Being, then reading is like seeking a torch for us to explore more tracks into this all-enveloping forest.

Gift from God

That is why reading in itself is so joyful and liberating, if you happen to read the suitable sort of materials. It allows the reader to emancipate himself from the oppressive prison of his pitiable ego, and propels his imagination to soar through his skin so to speak, into a delightful universe where his dreams and fears can find anchor in communion with other human beings.

Reading can set you free.

Book lovers are graced. That love for reading cannot be bought or sold for a million Ringgits. It is the greatest gift from God to mankind. It turns the boredom of leisure hours into absorbing eternity of delightful enchantment in a way that television or MTV will never do.

We read in order to learn - sometimes. The most pleasurable reading, however, is that which has no purpose. The avid reader reads widely and deeply, not because he wants to gain anything by it consciously, but because his humanity compels it, and demands it as a right of passage through this confusing business of living a life until death.

As Paulo Freire remarked in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , we have but one vocation in life, and that is to be human. If that is so, then reading books is as crucial to our existence as eating, drinking, and sleeping.

By this time, you would have guessed rightly that I am a book addict. The outburst of my love of reading was released before I even went to school - by a father who began to tell me stories of The Waterfront from ancient China, when I was four or five. In the midst of our material deprivation then, those wonderful worlds of books made me wealthy beyond measure.

They still do today.