That was how people had reacted even when Surat had a brush with `Television Winanu Saptah' (Week Without Television) early this year. The attempt to debunk the idiot box and highlight its negative aspects was largely successful, notwithstanding the occasional cynic.

Now comes `Aavo, Vachiye Ane Vichariye' (Let's Read and Think), a project floated by the South Gujarat University's Department of Education and principals of some city schools to inculcate reading habits among school children.

The novel idea will be put to test over a period of six months beginning January 1, 1999. The subjects will be students of the Xth, XIth and XIIth standards.

But how does one ensure that students read something other than textbooks? Simple. Introduce a competition. Students participating in the project at both the city and district levels will be asked to make a file of 50 articles they read from newspapers and magazines during the period -- they'll also have to read at least one book -- and submit them to their respective schools. The schools will select the best five, which will qualify for the final round, where a panel of prominent persons from different walks of life will judge the files.

Each student will be interviewed by the panelists for half-an-hour to gauge know how much he or she has grasped of those articles and whether they have benefited from it. The entries will be judged on the value of the articles selected and whether they are thought-provoking. Articles that are merely informative or on sleazy incidents (for instance, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) are strictly taboo. No marks will be given for the file's appearance, according to Education Department head and the brain behind the project Shashikant Shah.

Shah has already spoken to more than two dozen school principals who are interested in the project. But some questions have been raised about the timing of the project; after all won't the students be busy with their Board examinations? Shah counters this by saying that all the project demands of the participant is half-an-hour every day. ``When they can afford to spend so much time before the mirror, serious students should not face any problem sparing few minutes every day,'' he says.

What prompted him to conceive the project was the general complaint that ``students don't read anything (apart from text-books).'' But ironically, he says, one of the first reactions to the project said, ``Make the lecturers read first and then concentrate on the students''. Shah says he couldn't agree more when the caller pointed out that ``many expensive books in the university library were untouched''.

Incidentally, Shah was also the mastermind of the `Television Winanu Saptah', when about 2,000 students from 20 schools and their families stayed away from their TV sets from February 1 to 7. The idea then was to make the best use of the television-free time to allow participants catch up with all they missed out on by devoting hours to the idiot box: visiting friends, interacting with family members, going for walks etc.

Shah admits there was no systematic follow-up to that experiment, making it difficult to quantify its success. This time he has decided to leave the job to school authorities.

The bottomline of the project, he says, is that ``(the files) should not be a mere mechanical collection of articles''. The winners of the project will get Rs 3,000, Rs 2,000 and Rs 1,000 as prizes; there will also be 10 consolation prizes.

Shah says there are several grey areas in the project, which are expected to be ironed out at a public meeting to be attended by parents and teachers next month.

``Reading is one vyasan (vice) I would like students to have. If they are hooked to it they will have little time for other vices'', he adds.