Yes, they read. Despite the distractions of a multimedia world, children in India’s cities are finding the stories they want to curl up with. Don’t even think Harry Potter

She’s 13, shy and, unlike her heroine Bella, in no danger of falling in love with gorgeous vampires. But if you’ve walked around with haunted eyes after a day spent in the pages of Pride and Prejudice, daydreaming about Elizabeth Bingley and her amours, you’ll know that Sanchi too is a girl possessed. She has read the four books of the Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series that track the gothic love story between 17-year-old Bella and Edward Cullen, a vampire trying hard not to devour his beloved, thrice — locking herself into its world with the feverish abandon that only young readers bring to books. “She reads everywhere, all the time. Even at weddings,” mother Poonam exclaims in mock-exasperation at her home in south Delhi. “Bella is just like me,” says Sanchi. “She’s just another girl, not outstanding in anything. An average student, she’s quite shy too and loves reading. You could say we both moan there are no rewards for reading. Maybe the story is bizarre but though Edward is a vampire, the emotions could be about any other boy,” she says.

You would do better than think Sanchi is a member of a lost tribe of children who read books and not flashing tickers on their game consoles. A good number of parents, teachers, librarians, publishers and book-sellers in India’s major cities are revising their opinion of young ones as Pepsi-swilling Cartoon Network crazies who would not so much as drift near a book. Like Amitha Damodaran from Chennai, who is a little dazed by the decisiveness with which her seven-year-old Abhinaya shops for books. Or Manisha Gupta from Delhi, who tells us with an embarrassed chuckle how her daughter Anya, barely six, has begun to treat the neighbourhood bookshop like her library. “She is done reading two or three picture books by the time I have picked one,” says Gupta. Or Manisha Chaudhry, who tells us not to take her 14-year-old son Dhruv Gopinath, a Class IX student at a Delhi school, seriously when he says he doesn’t read a lot these days. “That just means he reads four books a month and not 20, as he did before,” she says.

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