Youth should be induced to study literature to acquire good manners and culture
KARACHI: The young generation is fast moving away from culture and literature. This is a sad state of affairs. As for music it has come to mean only the pop variety.
Today’s youth has no taste for classical or semi-classical music, which are the base of all music. Every Tom Dick and Harry claims himself or herself to be an accomplished pop singer and pop musician by simply carrying guitars in the hands. Young boys and girls have no interest in literature.
They are not even familiar with Gulliver’s Travels and its author, Jonathan Swift. They do not know who are Charles Dickens and his works like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Pickwick Papers. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and Virginia Wolf are unknown to them.
Likewise, they do not know who are Iqbal, Manto, Ghalib, Mir and other great men of letters of Urdu language. They do not know who are T S Eliot, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Emily Dickinson.
Today’s young people have little respect for elders. Well-known writers and poets are repeatedly saying one should keep distance from today’s youth for they are increasingly becoming indiscriminately aggressive. The youth should be induced to study literature to acquire good manners and culture.
Saba Ikram
Published in The Express Tribune, August 5th, 2019.
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