According to Hindustan Times, paper books are a rare sight on the Delhi Metro, where most commuters are absorbed in their mobile phones. The newspaper's Delhiwale column gathered a series of sightings of readers who kept their books open during their journeys.
Sightings across the network
One reader was seen on the Violet Line, just after the train left JLN Stadium station, holding a biography of Agyeya by Akshaya Mukul. On the Blue Line, a young man was reading George Orwell's 1984. On the Magenta Line, a masked passenger read Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and kept reading as he moved to the door near Vasant Vihar station.
The column also reports a commuter on the Violet Line reading Sidney Sheldon's The Stars Shine Down, identified as Mithlesh. Earlier columns, as cited by Hindustan Times, featured Nikhil from Dwarka, who read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy during his commutes, and Manika from Noida, who read Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Longer journeys
Another sighting came on the Yellow Line between Gurugram and Green Park, where a long-haired man was absorbed in Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. The final sighting in the column was on the Blue Line, where Tanmay was reading Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His train was heading to its last station, Vaishali in Ghaziabad.
What the column says about reading habits
The column notes that a mobile phone within reach makes it easy to leave a book mid-sentence to check a notification. The readers it describes, however, seemed better at resisting that pull, rarely looking up from the page even as stations passed and crowds moved around them. The column asks whether the metro may be the only time some of these readers have for a book in a day otherwise filled with college, office, family and friends.