On the Idea of Reading

I have always been a loner, choosing solitude over company, silent meditation over joyous evenings with friends. But a man cannot just live by himself. He needs something or someone, an awe inspiring date with nature, a transcendent romance with a piece of music, words, activity or mission, anything that can fill the void of his loneliness.

Far back in my childhood, I remember the brown pages of the ‘’Famous Five’’ novels that I used to borrow from my school library. We used to live a clichéd life in the city of Khetri (Rajasthan). The summers were very hot. I couldn’t go out in the scorching sun, so reading science and litterateur, dreaming and playing with my younger brother were my only time-pass. But somewhere deep inside, I always wanted to run away from that city, I wanted to be born again, reincarnated as Julian, doing adventures at Kirrin Island as he did in the Enid Blyton’s famous series of Novels.

I love reading books. I also like collecting books. At this age, I have a pretty wonderful library that I like to boast about among my friends. I am always very careful in preserving my books. Most of the paperbacks get swollen due to moisture. One idea is to keep it leaf side towards a damp surface, preferably in your book shelf. After you complete a book, keep it pressed under some other books for a few days. This helps to prevent the damage on the cover page of the book.

The first book (fiction) that I bought was ‘’Black Beauty’’ by Anna Sewell. An interesting read, a heartfelt-story about a horse, Black Beauty started a strange urge inside me to read and learn more, understand the world and see the world, as some other people in the past understood and saw it.

Mario Puzo

Is there an end to Imagination? I don’t think so, but if it is, the perimeter of the extent of human imagination is tied with the extent of human experience. Mario Puzo who wrote ‘’Godfather’’ was himself a pulp journalist. His experience into the intricacies of Mafia families of Italian-Americans helped create great characters and an outstanding storyline in his most seminal work, ‘’The Godfather’’. He also got an Oscar for writing the screenplay for the movie based on his novel.

Characters created in the novels must be somewhere linked to the people that a writer meets in his life. Is it strange to note that Thomas Hardy’s Wessex was nothing but a makeover of Dorset where he was born in? Charles Dickens wrote prodigiously about the plight of men in urban, industrialized, warring societies.  He was born in that era and he grew up among the struggling lower class of the early 19^th century England. I remember reading ‘’The Christmas Carols’’ in the sunny winter afternoons in Bhagalpur. That place was so dull. In the winters, it became even duller. I could imagine how Ebenezer Scrooge must have felt when the ghost of Christmas past took him to the house of Bob Cratchit. Bob’s son is ill and he cannot give him a good treatment because Scrooge is unwilling to pay him a decent wage. Only if we could see where our actions are taking us - We speak because we can but we do not care for the words we speak, we do not care about the pain that our words cause on our loved ones. But Dickens’s story is more than that.

It’s a sharp critic on the English bourgeoisie; it is a cry for help and affection for the people that have been suppressed under the boots of the machines of capitalism and greed. It was and still is a socialist movement in itself. Offered with a Christmas cake and a light of hope, this novel is a reminiscence of what litterateur can bring with it.

Words have a huge power. Actions come next. It was the words of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King that brought the revolution for Human rights around the world. I have tried my hands in Non-Fiction, History, Philosophy and my dear sweetheart science. There have been many books in the past that have challenged the notion of God. But none of them come any way closer to the analytical, scientific, logical and even poetic prowess of Richard Dawkin’s, ‘’The God Delusion’’. I think this book can be rightly called the Bible of atheism. I read it for science (After I had read, The Selfish Gene). Faith for me was always like a harlot’s virginity, gone forever an evening and I never even knew about it.  But my favourite author and speaker in the field of atheism is Mr. Christopher Hitchens. I just love him. In a documentary where he said that he had a whole collection of the writings of Orwell, I started collecting them too. I have got 1984 and Animal Farm in my library.

I think Orwell was a prophetic genius. Whatever he predicted in his book is what we can see today in many developed countries. Socialism has failed. Capitalism at its extreme has become the mother and father of that ‘’Big Brother’’ that we all hated and feared off in ‘’1984’’. There was a time when I used to think that God sends these people to warn us and help us in our times of misery, with the accidental discovery of Penicillin by Fleming and prophetic voices of Orwell and Khalil Gibran, I always thought that God had never abandoned us with Jesus and Krishna. He was always with us in the form of these great writers and thinkers.

Book is not only about learning new things. I do not believe in free-will. I think that every experience and feeling that we get from the outside world conditions our brain. We are conditioned due to the sounds we hear, colours we see, things we touch (or things that touch us), our daily experience, just everything around us. When that arrogant friend from my neighbouring room meets me, I know that I am conditioned by his words.

So, I think, why not hang upon the last straws of choice that I have. Why not get conditioned by Scott FitzGerald or J.D Salinger instead of my immature hostel-mate?

“Sea going merchants are right to ensure that dissolute, blasphemous or wicked men do not sail in the same ship with them, believing such company to be unlucky.  That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with and calling on the god for help: ‘’Shut up”, he said, ‘’so that they do not realize that you are here with me”. When Albuquerque, the viceroy of India was in peril from a raging tempest, he took a boy on his shoulders for one reason only: so that by linking their fates together the innocence of that boy might serve him as a warrant and intercession for God’s favour and so bring him to safety.” [Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude]

You can take the analogy from the above words. We steal a part of the person that we live with. So shouldn’t we try to be in the company of wise and rational, aesthetic and revolutionary people?  Life doesn’t provide us a chance to meet so many versatile people but we can still talk to many interesting people and hear their words through their writings.  Harper Lee’s creation, Atticus Finch has been an immense influence on me. Gabriel Garcia gorgeously explores the darkness and moonlight of love and its pain in his momentous work, ‘’Love in the time of Cholera’’.

Reading brings me back my teenage through ‘’Catcher in the Rye’’, a piece of Romance through ‘’Rebecca’’, desolation and tear of a friendship long gone through ‘’Bridge to Terebithia’’.

I have loved reading the works of Larry Collins. He is a brilliant history researcher and story writer. I have read ‘’Freedom at Midnight” and “O Jerusalem” by him and Dominque Lapierre.  Any Indian who has not read Freedom at Midnight should try this book. It is a story that takes us back into the pre-1947 era, in the days of friendship and love between Hindus and Muslims and the time when Lahore was the still the ‘’Paris of the Orient” and still a part of Bharat. I have shuddered and occasionally cried while reading that book. It is a book that has made me closer to India and strangely closer to our lost brothers in Pakistan.

Whenever I write, I mostly write about fantasy. Elves and witches, magic castles and knights, something that we can never achieve, I like to read and travel in their world through books. Harry Potter was my favourite when I was a teenage; Frodo Baggins is now my choice (From Lord of the Rings). Novels like these also tell us what free expression and imagination can achieve. It can take us to strange places, new worlds and make us feel things that we can never feel in the real world.

We are all witnesses of this time and place of the world. Let us read books from the writers of past and become time travellers too. The past without its mobile phones and internet is not boring, it has got its Sherlock Holmes and Camille, Manderlay and Mordor, and the brilliant writers have bequeathed us with a huge treasure. Let us be the treasure hunters in Library and search for books from different times and of different genres.

I am going to start reading D.H Lawrence’s ‘’Lady Chatterley’s lover”... here how it starts..

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened; we are among the ruins...”