KARACHI: The Applied Economics Research Centre (AERC) at the University of Karachi launched its book club with a discussion about the book The Economy of Modern Sindh: Opportunities Lost and Lessons for the Future at their auditorium here on Tuesday.

Sharing the aims and objectives of the club Professor Dr Samina Khalil, director of AERC said that the thought that “we have lost our heritage of book reading” had always concerned her.

“We may read textbooks, documents and journals but when it comes to reading books which do not happen to be required reading, we don’t feel there is a need to explore them,” she said.

“Today, restaurants, plazas, malls are replacing bookshops and libraries which is not a good indicator of a developing economy,” she added.

“You need to read books to know what is going on around you in the world and to boost and enhance your imagination, power of judgment and social sense,” she said.

“You can learn anything about everything and everything about anything,” she said, adding Carl Sagan’s quote that “books break the shackles of time.”

“Dinosaurs didn’t read. Look what happened to them,” she joked.

Dr Shakeel Ur Rehman Farooqui of the Department of Genetics at KU said that books played a significant role in making our lives pleasurable. “But sadly, people are moving away from books,” he said.

“Before graduating from high school I had read all the Urdu fiction that I could lay my hands on in our school library,” he said, adding that now he sees people who find it a challenge to even read a book for 10 to 15 minutes. “After that they get distracted and put down the book. But what is important is what you were able to read in even that little time,” he said.

“I know it can be hard when you find no cookies or popup windows while reading a book,” he joked.

Coming to the book The Economy of Modern Sindh, he said that before going abroad for higher studies, he used to pick up the morning paper and turn to the sports page. “But after returning I started opening the business pages first,” he said.

Dr Aijaz A. Qureshi, one of the co-authors of The Economy of Modern Sindh, said that books made people complete human beings. “They are also known to bring people out of depression,” he added.

About his own book, he said that collecting data for it turned out to be a huge challenge. “It took us three years to collect data for the book, which was not easy and I am sure a lot must also have been left out,” he said.

“So I request all students and teachers studying it to tell us about it because that is how ideas are exchanged,” he said.

Nadeem Hussain, the book’s other co-author, said that they had a diverse readership in mind when writing the book, especially the non-economic students. “We intended it to be a general reading book. We wanted to show the economics of the province from the lens of governance,” he explained.

He said that it was also a treatise for students and researchers as they wanted it to trigger an educated discussion about the economics of the province. “We wanted people to think about what went wrong with the province,” he said.

Research students Huda Najeeb, Affa Siddiqui, Na­ila Ahmed, Qaveem Akhtar and Sara Nizamani also spoke.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2019