Potter mania: Children with the latest J.K. Rowling book

I know I’ll be cursed by many, or most, of the Harry Potter fans, but I can’t help stating what I feel like after reading newspaper reports following J.K. Rowling’s latest offering. The stories and photos that greeted the release of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince had probably one thing to tell ? Potter fans all over the world spent sleepless nights with the numbing thought that they would reach bookstores only after the last copy of the title is sold.

Only such a fear explains the queue in front of the bookshops in this city at dawn on July 17, the day the title was released. The photos reminded me of the reports from US cities when the preceding volume of the Potter series was released. Journalists recounted how kids braved the midnight chill to be the first one in the queue to buy the book. If the children in New York can do that, so can those in Calcutta.

One can say this is what success is all about; Rowling’s writing is so gripping...; Potter casts his spell on the young and old alike...; etc. But that only explains Rowling’s bank accounts, not the queues before bookshops at dawn. You need science to make sense of the latter.

The idea called ‘meme’ comes to mind. It was first floated in 1976 when the British biologist Richard Dawkins wrote his immensely controversial book The Selfish Gene. It turned biology on its head, arguing that rather than genes being the bodies’ tools to make more bodies, bodies were genes’ tools for making more genes. To say that organisms are merely “lumbering gene rotbots” trying to achieve their own selfish ends was found to be too depressing for many to accept. And Dawkins was blamed for robbing human life of whatever ‘meaning’ it was left with since Charles Darwin.

Tucked inside Dawkins’ tome was the idea of meme. Its a concept ? a fashion, slogan, like or dislike ? which seeks hosts ? new minds ? to replicate itself. What genes are to bodies, memes are to minds. So meme was a powerful concept, but, strangely, it took time to capture the minds of other Darwinian thinkers. Then in 1999 British researcher Susan Blackmore took an entire book, The Meme Machine, to explain why meme is so useful to explain, among other things, wildfire-like spread of e-mail jokes.

Maybe Potter-mania, too, is a meme. Kids read his tales because their peers tell them they are good, and then mimic their peers’ conduct to show how much they love his adventures. Queuing up hours in advance to purchase a book is one way to express that love.

We see memes’ tricks all around us. An India-Pakistan cricket match is all it takes to make us patriots overnight. We hoist national flags on our rooftops simply because our neighbours do it.

Long live meme.