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School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work." Jawaharlal Nehru (left) and Mahatma Gandhi in conversation at the All-India Congress committee meeting in Bombay.

Beatty also stated that their society burned books to try to make everyone equal, so as to make everyone feel better about themselves: At first it was the fear of it all going away. It’s like when you’ve been hungry, or when you’ve tried and failed, or when you’ve hit the bottom, when you get a second chance, you do anything you can to secure your spot. You do anything you can to force people to take note of what you’re doing. Now, though, I just have so much to say and I want to make sure I say it all. Sethi, who teaches Modern Indian History at IIT Mandi’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, notes that the collection of texts is “united by their patriotic sentiments, their sense of mission and by the fact of their all being banned”. You’ve had a lot of success now, but you still do a lot of talks at schools and juvenile detention centres. Why is that important?

There are other reasons that Beatty stated for burning books; one is because people simply stopped reading them at all out of laziness. Books got condensed and shortened so people could "read" them faster; pretty soon, they just disappeared because people didn't want to make the effort. Quoting American academic N.G. Barrier’s study of banned literature and publications, Sethi writes that 8,000-10,000 individual titles were proscribed, and 2,000 newspapers were subjected to legal restraint during the last 40 years of colonial rule.

New Delhi G-20 summit | How Prime Minister Modi turned an annual diplomatic event into a grand political spectacle The only thing that’s unusual about my story is that I became a writer. But me not reading is the norm. And me not reading till I was 17 – none of my friends did. Most of my friends still don’t, and that’s boys and girls. The screens frequently mentioned in the novel are a type of network that watches the citizens while providing a type of entertainment/propaganda. Bradbury is trying to warn people of the mind-numbing effects of television. Bradbury is warning people of the hypnotic propaganda potential of television. the word 'intellectual' became the swear word it deserved to be...you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright'...and wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings...after hours?"