Today is the first death anniversary of Zubeen Garg. Across Assam, fans and artistes gathered at Zubeen Kshetra in Sonapur, singing his songs, closing a three-day remembrance. I remembered a line of his instead: “Gamuchai ata jati rokhya nokore, kitap nopora jati ata ketiau strong hobo nuare” — a gamusa alone will not protect a people; a nation that does not read books can never become strong.
He was not attacking the gamusa. He was pointing at the difference between wearing an identity and building one. One takes a moment. The other takes years of quiet, unglamorous attention.
Here is my own small, slightly embarrassing evidence. I have kept a blog since 2014. When I publish something I have actually thought about — a piece on the Upper Assam floods, on solitude at an ashram in Wales — the readership is modest, the comments fewer. When I post a photograph, the numbers behave completely differently. Same person, same followers, same day. The only variable is how much attention the thing demands.
I do not say this bitterly. I say it because it is a measurement, and it is measuring something in all of us, including me.
Reading a difficult page and writing an honest paragraph are the two cheapest technologies we have for thinking, and we are quietly abandoning both. The writing habit especially. A generation ago, an Assamese household had letters, diaries, notebooks, arguments in the margins of books. Now we have reactions. A reaction costs nothing, which is exactly why it buys nothing.
There is a physiology to this. Through most of a reactive day we are running in beta — alert, busy, defensive, the state of the unread notification. Slow down, breathe, sit without reaching for the phone, and the brain settles toward alpha: relaxed but awake, the state in which you can actually hear yourself. Go further — deep meditation, the trance you fall into when writing longhand and lose track of an hour — and theta appears, where insight and memory move more freely. And in long-term meditators, researchers have recorded unusually strong gamma activity, associated with vivid, integrated awareness. The sequence is not a ladder you climb once. It is a road you learn to travel, and the toll is stillness.
Reading a serious book is alpha training. Writing is theta training. Doom-scrolling is beta on a drip.
So this is my tribute today. Not a status, not a black-and-white photograph. Fifteen minutes, no phone, a real book. Then a notebook, and three honest sentences about what I actually felt — and why.
Every person carries the potential for this depth. Very few sit still long enough to find it. That, more than any algorithm, is what pains me.
Kitap nopora jati ata ketiau strong hobo nuare. Neither, I think, will a mind.
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