Erudite Mr. Shashi Tharoor’s column (link) hit home for me, especially since I have been encouraging our young one to read (and review) books, which he has been doing for a couple of years.

Mr. Tharoor concludes with Margaret Atwood’s much quoted warning, “If there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy will be dead as well.”

'* Shashi Tharoor is former international civil servant (UN Under Secretary General) bureaucrat, politician, a noted writer and public intellectual who has been serving as Member of Parliament