The new Potter book has taken the world by storm, yet again
WE are on the boat approaching Martha’s Vineyard in New England. It’s a pretty sight. Not for Beth, though. Her eyes are centred on the pages of a book she’s hefted along for the trip. “I was up all night reading Harry Potter,” declaring her adoration, she shuts the book to draw it close to her heart and sighs, “it’s phenomenal.”

On Saturday last, the campus at midnight, exploded with book parties held by the Harvard Book Store and the Coop at Harvard Square. Students rushed to own Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth of a series that everyone is talking about. Out of 10 million copies printed — a publishing record — America alone celebrated the release with over 5,000 book parties all across.

Flushed with a feel of victory, her eyes swimming in excitement, as though she had stepped on the moon, Beth, a graduate student is pursuing creative writing for the summer. “I love the book because it has my favourite character,” she rhapsodizes when asked precisely why she’s going overboard.

“My other friends at the dorm love it too — there’s something awesome for everyone to relate with the characters.” We are standing at the hull and suddenly the fog horn goes off deafening out Beth’s superlatives for J.K Rowling, the author of Harry Potter. Once upon a time, a single mom, who lived in welfare housing and stole nappies from public bathrooms for her baby, is a billionaire today, enjoying a rock star fan mania.

Brian, who has been quiet till now, speaks up once Beth moves away. “For the life of me, I can’t understand why people like Harry Potter so much. It’s just fiction. A lot of imagination. It has no intellectual weight,” says this 18-year-old, an economics student. He’s come from Arizona and behaves like a perfect gentleman. Holding a book he’s brought to read, “I like non-fiction”, he says, showing me the cloth cover in red. It’s called Rare Earth and is about astronomy. Oh, how boring? I say. “Not at all ... it’s a great read. But this is not a page-turner like Beth’s book. I have to do close reading.”

There are two people in his know poring over Harry Potter for their doctoral thesis. “Isn’t that crazy?” While I tend to agree, Brian is still outnumbered at Harvard: most people, older or younger to him, are potty about the new book just as the rest of the 35 million around the earth. Harold Bloom, a Yale English professor, has entered the fray but on the perverse side. Is it “a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages?” he writes in The Wall Street Journal, “yes ... and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter”.

Soon enough, Bloom snarls, Harry Potter may become a part of college curriculum, and vastly responsible for this “epiphenomenon” will be The New York Times, whom Bloom castigates as “celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies”.

In class, Matthew Battles, who works at the Houghton Library that houses rare books at Harvard, tells us that only one per cent of books in America make it to 50,000 copies in their lifetime.

“Retail sales for Harry Potter have broken all kinds of records here,” he says. How did it happen? “Well, it mixes characteristics of a boarding school — the bit that fascinates America — and moves beyond its minutia of adolescents growing up, combining immersive fiction of adults with children’s fantasy, a precise stew of design to appeal to all age groups.”

It’s a “richly figured novel,” he adds, as we discuss the future of publishing and reading habits among Americans.

Earlier at the local book store, I pick up Library, a book by Battles tracing the evolution of libraries through centuries. “An unquiet history” as the cover reads, I wonder how unquiet is Battles’s mind over this transformative experience that Harry Potter has revolutionized; how will it impact on the libraries. “Rowling got an extraordinary idea of a mass collective experience where everybody around the world gets the book and reads it at the same time — the content is tailored to every individual’s taste and together, people read her books and enjoy it.”

The author of Library who blows the dust off “our stodgy, conventional conception of the library to reveal the living heart of culture that beats beneath its stone facade” (Los Angles Times Book Review) will, one day who knows, write a whole new book on Potter’s populism.

“Look Mom, you are now saying that you want to come on Tuesday and not Monday?” the brat from Korea, born and raised in America, screams into her cell phone. It’s a dreamy sort of a day and the spray from the fountain in front of the Science Centre feels good on the face. We are seated on big buffed stones surrounded in shade. The girl, yes you guessed it, is reading Harry Potter. “Why can’t you come to visit me on Monday?” she continues harshly and then cuts her mother off midway.

The birds in her cell twitter (there are all kinds of tunes ringing off the cells around the campus). Soaked in the pages, she’s even curter this time, “Look ... how many times must I tell you that if you want to come spend the night in my dorm, I have to ask my room mates permission.” She hangs up again. The chirpy bird tune comes on again and she blasts in the phone, “Don’t give me a hard time,” breaking into Korean, realizing she has a nosy listener — that being me — following the mother-daughter duel in the sun.

Every fourth student I pass is an oriental. Chinese, Korean or Japanese. I don’t know if they have come from these countries or are naturalized American citizens. It’s hard to tell since they blend unheeded in the campus colours, never carrying their nationalities on their sleeves, as we South Asians do.

Larry Summers, the university’s president, in his address to students, speaks of the challenges that America will face in this century. He pushes two hot buttons: the rise of Asian economies and the revolutionary changes in medical science.

He says when history of the present times gets written, “the tragic errors” America can make, could lead to “global conflict and to global cataclysm.” Harvard should help provide leadership, “a new thought that can apply old values in a new context created in a changing world.” Asia has to be watched closely, is his second observation. As an economist, Summers has seen the writing on the wall — China and India ready to challenge America in global markets, science and technology.

Secure your turf, Mr President. Arfa has already arrived. Pakistan’s ‘girl wonder’ who is the youngest certified Microsoft expert in the world, was a personal guest of its founder Bill Gates, last week. The 10-year-old genius is a product of schools in Faisalabad and once she comes of age, before Gates can snatch her to design a self-navigating car, she will be knocking hard at the gates of Harvard for a triumphant entry. It’s her dream.

Naught for nothing is Larry Summers fearful then. Harvard in this century is poised for an intellectual onslaught from Asia. It will have to open up the doors.

Pakistan, one hopes, will be in the forefront when the knocking begins ... let a thousand Arfas bloom around the countryside to light up the stars in the universe.