RESEARCH

Are book fairs serving their purpose? W e are told that books are important, and they indeed are. However, what comes across from the sight of authors and poets -- some singers and actors too, if you consider the Kolkata Book Fair -- chatting in circles inside and outside the stalls, taking themselves for Socrates, is the fact that intellectuals are perhaps more important. Indians who have lived in the eastern parts of the country will recall that once upon a time parents used to exhort their children to read The Statesman to improve their English, if nothing else. Trying to please the parents thus was quite tasking for the li'l ones though. If allowed to celebrate the naïveté of this nincompoop a little, I'd recollect how painful it was those days to sit with both the newspaper and a voluminous dictionary, underline the most unusual of words -- curse the self-indulgent reporters/sub-editors who had a fascination for them -- in order to enhance one's vocabulary instead of ...