THERE is a particular scent that hangs in the air of a place that has been left behind by time.
It is the scent of old paper, of binding glue, of quiet dust settling on spines of books that are no longer pulled from their shelves. It is the scent that now haunts the bookshops of our greatest universities across Pakistan. One can feel it in the hallowed halls of the University of Peshawar, where the weight of history once seemed to be stored in its libraries. Here, the air was thick with the promise of intellectual pursuit. I remember the bookstalls just beyond the university gates, where the aroma of freshly brewed tea from a nearby stall would mix with the aged scent of paper.
The coffee shops weren’t just for a quick caffeine fix; they were the final arena for debates sparked by a chapter read, or an idea discovered. You’d see a student hunched over a well-worn text and another gesturing animatedly, book in hand, as they discussed a political theory or a verse of poetry. These were places of intellectual ceremony, where the simple, profound act of acquiring a book was a promise to engage, to immerse, to understand. The physical weight of the book in one’s bag was the tangible weight of potential knowledge, a commitment that felt real and weighty. That gravity has now been replaced by the weightless, endless glow of a screen and we must ask what has been lost in this ethereal exchange.
My memories stretch further, to the footpaths of Rawalpindi Saddar, a place that was a treasure hunt for any book lover with a modest budget. We would walk for hours, dodging vans and street vendors, our eyes scanning the chaotic piles of books stacked high on the footpaths. The thrill of the search was as rewarding as the find. Our hands would become dusty while picking through books spread out on the roadside, their covers coated with the dirt and grime of the street. That dust wasn’t just dirt; it was the mark of a successful quest, a badge of honour for anyone willing to put in the effort. The bargaining with the bookseller, the shared glance of triumph with a friend when you found a first edition of a classic for a fraction of its price, these were rituals that connected us to the knowledge we sought. It was a tangible, lived experience, a form of intellectual labour that had a physical reward. The book you finally held, a little worn and a little dusty, was a testament to your dedication. Today that dusty search has been replaced by an algorithmic suggestion, a frictionless click that delivers knowledge instantly, without the grit or the story of the hunt.
We have entered the age of the scrolling mentality and it is a fundamental rewiring of consciousness. To read a book is to embark on a linear journey. The author leads you down a path of their making, building an argument, a world, a narrative brick by brick. It demands patience, focus and a surrender to a tempo not your own. It is a deep, continuous dive into a single stream of thought. The scrolling mind, in contrast, does not dive; it skims. It is a horizontal flicker across a vast, oceanic surface of information. A viral reel is followed by a political hot take from a blogger, which is followed by a celebrity post, a meme, a notification, a search result summoned from the digital ether by Google or AI. The stream is endless and the context is perpetually shifting. The mind, in its attempt to keep up, adapts by becoming adept at grazing rather than digesting. It prioritizes the immediate hit of novelty over the slow, nutritious burn of comprehension.
In the specific context of Pakistan, this transformation carries a unique cultural weight. Ours is a society with a rich oral and literary tradition, where the poet and the scholar were once revered. The struggle for deep reading is not merely an academic concern; it is a cultural one. When a student at the University is given a book, even for free, the resistance is often not born of laziness but of a conditioned intolerance for the required pace. The scrolling mentality has bred an expectation of instant answers and effortless summaries.
Why wade through 300 pages of a book or a historical analysis when an AI chatbot can distill its ‘key takeaways’ in three bullet points? Why engage with the nuanced, complex arguments of a political theorist when a two-minute explainer video can provide a simplified, often sensationalized version? The danger is not the technology itself, but the atrophy of the intellectual muscle needed for critical thinking, for sitting with ambiguity and for constructing one’s own understanding from a sustained engagement with a text.
The future of Pakistan will not be written in the quick flicker of screens alone. A nation that forgets how to read deeply forgets how to think deeply and without thought there can be no vision. The scroll may connect us, but it cannot root us; it offers sparks, not fire. To reclaim depth is to reclaim imagination, patience and meaning itself. Our challenge is clear: to raise a generation that can move with agility through the digital tide, yet still treasures the stillness of a book, where wisdom breathes and where the seeds of true progress are sown.
—The writer is PhD in Political Science and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad.
