A Meditation on Choice Before Choice Dissolves
Prelude: Platform of Shadows
This was many moons ago.
The evening train from Guwahati was late. Again.
And I, an untidy pilgrim of words, shuffling from one foot to the other, had time enough to count the creases on my battered paperback and the muted LEDs breathing within the cover of my Kindle.
The platform smelled of many things, rust, wet wasted food, old coal but mostly of rain-drenched iron.
The paperback drank in that scent, hoarding it inside its ribbed spine like a secret kept close.
That book was a gift.
By whom, you ask?
Ask me no secrets, and I shall tell you no lies.
The Kindle, antiseptic and gleaming, repelled it, guarding its sterile, glassy face against the world’s messy perfumes.
It struck me then, suddenly and almost with heartbreak, that I might belong to the last living generation for whom the choice between paper and pixel is a breathing ritual, not a historical reenactment, not a museum diorama where children stare through glass.
We are the last flickering candle before the winds change forever.
1. Between Thumb and Swipe
My father, a little stooped these days but sharp as Arjuna’s arrow, is a baby-boomer whose spectacles fog every time my Maruti’s AC springs to life.
It was two winters ago when he first held a Kindle.
He stared at the screen, pinched it skeptically, as though testing an unknown creature and then, almost against his old-school instincts, he smiled.
He absolutely adored it.
He could enlarge the words! A eureka moment, almost.
The alchemy of the fonts. The self-lighting screens.
The way a book could grow brighter at a touch, no longer shackled to moody tube lights and erratic voltage.
A distinguished Journal essay I had once bookmarked on paper, ironically had predicted this:
Older readers cherish the device’s accessibility, while younger millennials court paperbacks like vintage jeans, seeking a detox from digital storms.
Our family breakfasts at Guwahati now echo this quiet schism.
My father’s forefingers poke at the Kindle’s screen; my own fingers linger, almost stubbornly, on linen paper.
My daughter, born to a touchscreen world, already pinches pages that were never meant to respond.
It is, perhaps, not merely a battle between two objects.
It is a battle between two temporalities.
Two memories of time.
Two ways of loving words.
2. A Chorus of Debates
If you lean close to the internet, you can hear it scream, the endless, looping debate.
Kindle or paperback?
Swipe or turn?
Feather or fiber?
On YouTube, Vaani from Chalchitra smiles into the screen, urging viewers to cherish both formats: paper for nostalgia, Kindle for nomadic life, as if trying to reconcile a divided house under one roof.
On the same channel, Dhruv Chitgopekar and Shreya Vajpei juggle clever metaphors: the portability of Kindles versus the perfumed stubbornness of pulp. Piu, grinning like a secret, reminds us: sometimes you crave the crackle of a real page; sometimes you crave an instant download when the night presses too heavily onto the heart.
Elsewhere, Sheila Bounford, her voice almost plaintive, mourns the fading certainty of “bottom of page 125.”
In a world of doom scrolling, the shared page number is becoming an endangered species.
Without it, she warns, we lose something communal: the campfire glow around which book clubs once huddled.
Meanwhile, Leigh Bortins, that steadfast advocate of classical education, insists:
Printed books teach not just reading, but attention.
Ownership.
Heft.
Tangibility.
The sacred gravity of stacking ideas onto oak shelves.
And yet, Tariq Khan, pragmatic and poetic in the same breath, bows to the Kindle’s thrift.
A thousand titles in a featherlight slate.
An ecological rebellion.
A portable eternity.
Each voice braids into the same haunting chorus:
Our choice between paper and pixel is no longer just preference.
It is autobiography.
3. The Convenience of Meanings
Once, to pause over a difficult word was to interrupt the river of reading.
One would reach out for a dictionary, or guess, or simply skip.
Now, on a Kindle, meaning itself glows a tap away.
Wikipedia claims that 85% of Kindle users look up a word mid-reading.
Not later. Not lazily. But immediately, in that sacred moment between breath and comprehension.
In darkened train compartments, with the landscape unwinding in whorls of mist, the Kindle blooms like the Northern Lights.
It highlights.
It bookmarks.
It exports.
It cross-syncs across oceans and time zones.
It transforms even the smallest commuter into a wizard of knowledge, gathering footnotes in their pocket.
Strangely, it is also communal.
You can see and re-read what others have highlighted in the very book you are cradling.
It feels like a kind of silent lit-fest between people across continents.
Transportation of feelings through portability.
Portability is not its only promise anymore.
It is portability of understanding.
Convenience of meanings.
Interpretation at the speed of a heartbeat.
4. The Geography of Memory
But if the Kindle offers convenience, the paperback offers terrain.
Memory, I find, is a cartographer who loves landmarks.
I remember passages not by page number alone, but by their placement in the body of the book, top-left, bottom-right, left of center 😉 crease.
The paperback does not merely hold words; it holds location.
It holds the latitude of longing, the longitude of feeling.
Sheila Bounford’s lament is mine too:
A pixelated progress bar cannot replicate the sensual geography of print.
The Kindle flattens hills into a smooth plateau.
The paperback keeps its valleys and its mountain passes.
And oh, how the heart loves to retrace old pilgrimages.
5. Ecology, Economy, Eternity
In a world gasping under the weight of carbon footprints, the Kindle whispers a promise of eco-salvation.
Numbers from Wikipedia tilt gently in its favour:
If you read more than five books a year, the carbon generated guilt tips toward e-ink.
There are wallet-whispers too.
Buy one Kindle, and perhaps, a lifetime of library.
But permanence.. oh, permanence lives elsewhere.
A paperback, once paid for, demands nothing but an occasional stream of sunlight and a forgiving shelf.
A Kindle must entertain corporations.
It runs on firmware updates and license renewals, on invisible permissions tucked away in server rooms you will never see.
It needs the cloud, that invisible empire, to breathe.
In the purest light, a paperback may be mortal, but its mortality is honest.
It frays, yellows, cracks but it never forgets how to exist without permission.
6. The Vanishing Fork in the Path
We, the children of the analog dawn and digital dusk, live astride a vanishing fork.
One path smells of old glue and ink-stained fingers.
The other gleams under clean, backlit skies.
But the fork is fading.
Our children, born to schoolbags compressed into silicon slabs, may never truly experience this fork as a decision.
They will default to the Kindle not because it is cheaper or lighter, but because it is the school, the library, the translation, the audiobook, the classroom, the secretary of annotations.
Paperbacks will remain.
But they will remain the way vinyl records remain today.
A relic of its time.
A slow rebellion.
A defiant joy in inconvenience.
One day soon, to choose a paperback will no longer be to choose the dominant.
It will be to choose the rare, the slow, the fragrant.
7. A Personal Benediction
As for me, I walk the liminal path.
I underline Sally Rooney in a paperback that smells faintly of December bonfires.
I annotate Cal Newport’s Deep Work on a Kindle that carries my scribbles across cities.
I live with both loves.
And I am grateful.
I am the last candle between paper and pixel, flickering in two directions, casting twin shadows.
When this candle goes off when choice dissolves into default, I hope the next room, glowing cold-white with tablets and holograms, will still somehow hear the rustle of a turning page.
Will still smell, if only faintly, the scent of a rainy railway platform.
Until that time, my generation has a task, humble and holy:
To savour the act of choosing.
To turn every page with reverence, whether it be papery or pixeled.
Because to choose, in the end, is to remember:
Stories do not need a medium.
They only need a soul willing to journey ahead
finger to paper,
thumb to screen,
always turning, always moving
toward the next unknown chapter.