Reading Opened Vistas, Across Time And Space And Cultures
As soon as we were three years of age - there were two of us in that household where we were subletting a room from another family - we were taught to write and read, ceremoniously, the way children are in India. We had a slate and a non crumbling chalk each and were given what shape to make, and the sound it was associated in an invariable one to one association, like it is in most Indian languages and certainly the three that were our primary languages in the same order, each with its own place and importance.
Since in most languages of India have a script - frequently different in looks but similar in logic of the script - that is totally phonetic (unlike the Roman script) there is no difficulty of spelling as in most languages of Europe (if Greek is different due to being closer to Sanskrt, I don't yet know of it), it is easy to learn to read and write
in India, and by the age of four I was not only reading fluently but looking at
lists of other books I could read, looking at prices given in the lists on the
backs of the books I read, and asking my mother to get me the selected one
("most pages for less money and the title is interesting too") - and
one day the two of them went together to the little market in our hometown that
is mostly bookshops and publishers location, named Budhwar Peth (Wednesday
Market) and got me a small carry on suitcase full of books appropriate for
children's reading, consisting of lives of various (Indian) saints and heroes
and so on. It so happened that the publication in our language for most of the
books for children was named appropriately for me, making it a personal relationship
in deep somewhere for me.
I was thus addicted to reading since shortly
after age of three, definitely before I was five. This continued through school
years, and college. There was that year of living in the hometown again when
our parents went abroad, and I had little company for a while other than books
- and I went every single day for over half a year to the major public library
in the town hall and was there every evening since opening to closing - they
usually had to tell me more than once they were closing, and while we were
supposed to leave by seven forty five so they could close at eight, I left
frequently by eight fifteen or so, around the time the librarians left. Then I
had a few friends, finally, and reading was a little on back burner for a
while, until we returned to the city we spent most of our childhood in. There
were good public libraries in every suburb around, and ours was a smaller
suburb with a smaller library, but one could always get to be a member of
another suburb public library.
During school years there were all these
possible public libraries to read through - when the nearby one was exhausted I
went with a friend to one that was an hour to walk each way, to bring books to
read. And then in college - ours was a good one, and had a good collection - I
went through the stacks while studying another subject, so it was a private
course in various literatures on my own - Hindi, Bengali, English. This
repeated again in Mumbai when I was finally in a serious job after finishing
one stage of post graduation, and the place had a good library, other than the
one I usually spent evenings at - so again there were these two libraries I was
going through, apart from a couple of private ones. I suppose most people have
other people to be with, and what with the way life had been, I had again and
again been swept from one place to another, friends and others never dependable
as companions or human contacts. So the books were the only reliable company,
and a good one it was, mostly.
Didn't read that much during those intense few
years that occur before finally graduating, after that first job - I had gone
for a long shot career qualification that was less for a career than for a path
to find one's way. This took me from Mumbai to around the globe to the other
side, and those years it was not possible to continue general reading - every
little action away from work had to be accounted for in some way and a serious
other interest had to go on a back burner. Then it was back to India and finding
a foothold, non trivial. Reading returned slowly, but establishing a homestead
was not so easy and took a long time. Meanwhile travelled a lot, lived in many
parts of the world, within and outside India. Some of these places had really
good public libraries, some good bookshops, some both and more.
The days of leisurely walks along roads on
footpaths (sidewalks) in Mumbai and perusing the booksellers' treasures along
the way on those sidewalks, of finding wonderful old second hand absolute
treasures and finds of books for very little, are long gone now in India - now
they too have fresh copies of hot new books, for perhaps a little less than you
might pay in a bookshop, but it might be a runoff for all that. Old classics,
alas, are not so readily available any more, unless either on academic
curriculum or republished for some reason, and then there are not always enough
copies after a while in the stores - everything has to be fast, including
movements of books off the shelves, these days. But this is completely opposite
to the spirit of books and of reading.
For good reading one requires more of leisure,
of a calm mind, and less of a restless spirit chasing after one goal or another
every moment of the day, driving one or others up the wall. That is equally
true for art, whether for pursuit or for appreciation. Even science at higher
levels needs a quiet mind and a time free of other chases to reach out into the
core.
Come to think of it most of inner
achievements can only be reached by a calm and focused spirit, without the
restlessness and the turmoil that is taken for drive - if you cannot sit still
and wait for deep results to fructify while going on working for your goal, you
might not know the way to the goal or pretty much anywhere else, for all the
dust you are raising quite unnecessarily by running around in circles.
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Life is solitary enough - but when people attempt to manipulate, control, blackmail, by withdrawing something or worse, by inflicting injuries and worse, to achieve power over soul of another - it would be difficult to hold on without an inner life.
But reading gives a body to an inner life slightly more visible than
more amorphous inner life one may have with mathematics or music or
meditation or art, and even with all of the latter, still - where would
one find humour, for instance, in a solitary life with mathematics and
music and meditation and astrophysics and so forth?
Perhaps it is only attempting to replace a
minuscule fragment of those that brought one up and then were too busy, and all
too soon gone from life.
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