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On the new season of India’s Got Latent, a contestant said something that should have been entirely unremarkable. Introducing herself, Suhasini mentioned that she was an avid reader, and that her favourite book was ‘The Alchemist’. The host, Samay Raina, pounced. How could she call herself an avid reader, he teased, when everyone has read that book? The audience laughed. It was a small moment, the kind that scrolls past in seconds. Yet it carried a quiet cruelty that anyone who loves books should sit with, because the joke was not really about her. It was about all of us, and what we have quietly decided reading is for.