Something beautiful, but increasingly unnecessary. Something our grandparents had time
for. Something associated with libraries, handwritten letters, old novels, worn-out poetry
collections and people sitting quietly beside windows with books in their hands. The modern
world has little patience for such images.
We live in an age of artificial intelligence, algorithms, instant communication, digital
currencies, genetic engineering, space exploration and machines capable of producing
information within seconds. A question that once required hours of research can now be
answered almost immediately. A message can cross continents before a person has finished
drinking a cup of tea. A camera can fit inside a pocket. And yet, beneath all this
technological acceleration lies an uncomfortable question:
If technology can give us almost everything instantly, what is literature still for?
The answer begins much earlier than the invention of the printed book. It begins with the
human desire to tell a story. Long before libraries existed, human beings gathered around
fire. They spoke about animals they had hunted, storms they had survived, ancestors they
remembered, places they feared and worlds they imagined. Stories allowed one generation
to pass something of itself to another. Before history was written, it was spoken; before
novels, there were epics; before newspapers, there were storytellers; before political
manifesto, there was spoken word. Literature emerged as humanity’s earliest means of
preserving memory, transmitting ideas, and making sense of existence. That is why some of
humanity's oldest surviving works are not instruction manuals or commercial records, but
stories, poems, myths, epics and philosophical dialogues.
Literature gave human beings a vocabulary for thinking about themselves. It offered words to
emotions that existed long before people knew how to express them, allowing individuals to
recognise their fears, desires, contradictions and aspirations. Through poetry, human beings
learned to articulate love, grief, longing and loss; through novels, they encountered the
complexities of identity, morality, ambition and belonging. By giving language to the
otherwise inexpressible, literature enables human beings to move beyond merely
experiencing life towards examining its meaning. It becomes both a mirror of the self and a
means of discovering who we are, what we value and what we might become.
History remembers those who held power; literature remembers those who lived beneath its
shadow. Kings leave monuments, and empires inscribe their triumphs into the record of time.
Yet beyond these grand narratives exist lives that history rarely pauses to acknowledge: the
mother waiting for a son who never returns, the migrant carrying the ache of a lost home, the
worker whose exhaustion goes unnoticed, the child whose earliest memories are shaped by
war, the woman whose existence never earns a line in a history textbook, the prisoner
erased from official records, and the refugee carrying an entire homeland within the fragile
borders of memory. These lives may leave no monuments, their suffering may find no place
in official archives, and their names may eventually disappear from public remembrance. But
literature gathers what history leaves scattered. It gives permanence to lives that power has
rendered invisible.
Sometimes a novel can teach us something about a society that statistics cannot. A statistic
can tell us how many people migrated. A novel can make us feel what it means to leavehome. A report can tell us how many people died in a war. A poem can make one death
unforgettable. A history book can tell us that an empire collapsed. A story can show us what
that collapse looked like inside a household. Literature turns information into experience.
And experience is much harder to forget.
Literature is also a training ground for empathy. It teaches us to step beyond the narrow
boundaries of our own experience and enter the inner worlds of others—to inhabit lives we
have never lived, sufferings we have never endured, and realities we may otherwise never
understand. Through literature, we learn to see the world not only from where we stand, but
from where others have been forced to stand. We encounter the hunger of the poor, the
humiliation of the oppressed, the loneliness of the displaced, the silent endurance of women,
and the moral struggles of individuals whose circumstances differ profoundly from our own.
A novel cannot make us experience another person's suffering in its entirety, but it can make
that suffering impossible to dismiss as an abstraction. It gives a voice to the voiceless, and
emotional depth to realities we might otherwise observe from a distance. Literature invites us
to understand before we judge, it cultivates the moral imagination necessary for living with
others. Its greatest achievement may not be that it makes us feel for fictional characters, but
that it changes how we perceive real human beings long after the book is closed.
The most dangerous person to power is not always the loudest, but the one who
understands. The politically informed citizen questions policy; the historically informed
recognises recurring patterns; the philosophically trained challenges hidden assumptions;
and the literate mind sees through the manipulation of language. This is why intellectual
education and literature have always shared a complicated relationship with power. What
threatens authority is not the book itself, but the questions it awakens. History reveals that
the present is not inevitable. Political philosophy teaches that authority must justify itself.
Literature cultivates empathy beyond the boundaries of one’s own social group, while the
memoir of a prisoner can unsettle accepted notions of justice. Encounters with other
civilizations remind us that our customs are neither universal nor inevitable. Literature does
not merely inform; it unsettles the certainties through which power sustains itself. And
certainty, when left unquestioned, can become a convenient instrument of control.
Attention has become an economic resource. The longer we remain on a platform, the more
opportunities it creates to display advertisements, collect behavioural data, and keep us
engaged. Our attention is no longer merely given; it is constantly pursued, measured, and
monetised. A notification interrupts a paragraph. A video fragments a thought. A headline
replaces reflection. One controversy gives way to another. We scroll, react, forget, and begin
again. The problem is not technology itself, but an economy designed to capture attention at
the expense of concentration. When distraction becomes habitual, sustained thought begins
to feel uncomfortable.
Literature demands precisely what the attention economy discourages: patience, silence,
and intellectual endurance. A novel cannot always be understood in seconds, a poem may
require rereading, and a philosophical argument resists reduction to a slogan. To read
deeply is to reclaim the ability to think without interruption, question without haste, and
remain with uncertainty without demanding an immediate answer.
The future is not a battle between books and technology. The real struggle is between
attention and distraction, reflection and reaction, memory and endless novelty, the desire to
understand and the temptation to consume without thinking. A person may possess the mostsophisticated devices and have access to limitless information, yet remain unable to think
beyond what they are repeatedly shown. Access to information is not the same as
understanding, just as constant exposure to ideas is not the same as independent thought.
This is why literature remains indispensable: it teaches us not merely to encounter ideas, but
to examine them, question them, and discover what they demand of us.
The future may need literature more than the past did. This is perhaps the greatest irony of
technological progress: the more efficiently we produce information, the more urgently we
need the wisdom to question it. Artificial intelligence can generate text, machines can
summarise books, algorithms can anticipate our preferences, and search engines can
retrieve answers in seconds. Yet none can relieve us of the responsibility to decide what is
worth knowing, what deserves belief, and what kind of world is worth building.
The greatest danger facing the technological generation is not that it will stop reading books,
but that it will lose the patience to question, the courage to doubt, and the imagination to
envision a world beyond the one presented to it.
In a world increasingly capable of producing answers, literature may be most vital for
preserving our capacity to ask the right questions.
— By: Asma Khurshid