'If there's a heaven, I imagine it would be a library'

The paper today carried an article about a 5000 sq ft reading room and library in Bandra. A reading room! In Bombay! Brought memories flooding back. I don’t remember the last time I was in one of those- probably the library at FTII, back in 2006. And yet some of my best childhood memories are to do with books.
In Apeejay, my first school, my favourite periods used to be Sports, Dance, Art and Library! We would have one library period a week, and were only allowed to issue one book. This of course was just not enough. So Ritu, the best friend and avid reader herself, and I were constantly exchanging books mid week. These were times of countless Noddys and Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews. I remember standing in queue at the chubby, fair librarian’s desk, so she could note down in her register the name and number of the book that each of us was issuing. I also remember wondering in later years if the stuff we read had any bearing on what was picked for us as awards at the end of the year. You see awards in Apeejay (for securing a rank in class is the only one I can speak of) were almost always books. So when I got one of the Classics, I wondered if they were tracking what I was reading, and trying to nudge me towards more serious stuff, or when I got a book of Mensa puzzles, that they were encouraging what they thought was a good habit. The only Classics I ever read, I’m ashamed to confess were the translated works of Charles Dickens (I loved ‘A Tale of Two Cities’), Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen… There must have been many more but these are all I can remember offhand.
Anyway, even exchanging books with Ritu was often not enough. That’s where the neighbourhood lending library came in handy. I don’t know if these libraries still exist, but they did when I was a kid, and boy, am I thankful that they did! The libraries I visited stored popular fiction. So I got introduced to the Perry Masons (Erle Stanley Gardner actually), PG Wodehouses, Agatha Christies, Edgar Allen Poes, Sidney Sheldons, Alistair Macleans, Jeffery Archers, Arthur Haileys and Robin Cooks. There was a whole phase of court room dramas and crime thrillers.
Comics were a whole different world. I used to devour Archies. I looked longingly at all the Tintins that a friend of mine owned, but they weren’t available in the local library. It didn’t seem to make sense to waste a whole week of reading on a Tintin so I never issued one from the school library, and I’m sad to say remain a stranger to it till date. I did read some Asterix, but didn’t take to it then. I was the Indian comics fan- Chacha Chaudhary, and innumerable other Pran comics; not so much the intelligent stuff like Target for me, though of course I did read those as well. There was something called Tinkle, but I only have a hazy memory of it. Then there were the Children's Book Trust publications that my parents subscribed to for me- I forget what it was called, but there used to be a monthly magazine that I would read cover to cover. Another favourite was Chandamama, which was not a comic of course, more an illustrated short story collection. And oh, the ever fantastic Amar Chitra Kathas! That was an ocean of knowledge.
The 80s (if I remember correctly) was a time of much Indo-USSR cultural exchange. One of those years was the festival of the USSR in India. That was an exciting year. There were wonderful fairs to go to, where Russian dancers with red cheeks would be jumping around in their colourful costumes. There was the Russian circus, which was just the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen. And there was the Russian book fair! This was introduction to the many Ukrainian folk tales, and to Ivan the Terrible. Oh, what joy!
I wonder where I got it from- perhaps both my parents are a little to blame! My father is an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, with the occasional fiction thrown in. My mother on the other hand, didn’t read much. But when she did it was those Hindi paperback novels- the Surendra Mohan Pathak types (that’s the only name I remember.) I tried reading one once- it was seriously freaky! I was amazed at the crazy imagination of the guy.
The move to Sardar Patel Vidyalaya also coincided with a slowing down in the reading. I don’t know why. Maybe I was dazzled with the whole new world that was SPV. It certainly was a bit of a culture shock. Which is seriously sad because in SPV we had more than one library card, if I remember correctly! ☺ I don’t have many memories of the library at SPV, not as many as those of the Apeejay library or the local libraries anyway. This was also a time of deep regret at not having taken up Hindi as a subject. SPV had a brilliant Hindi teacher in Kamal Satyarthi, and I longed to attend his classes. Especially when I heard the beautiful words recited by Sujai and Chetan in the corridor one day- they had memorized Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s ‘Jo beet gayee…’ and were trying to outdo each other! That scene is etched in my memory like it happened yesterday. I tried picking up some Hindi literary fiction around this time, but I was even slower at that, so gave up. Sujai, that absolute sweetheart, is also responsible for introducing me to Calvin and Hobbes, of which I am now a diehard fan.
College doesn’t even deserve a mention. There was little time to read, and given my speed, I was no longer joyfully discovering new authors. I have of course read the one or two odd Ayn Rand, Amitav Ghosh, Rohington Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Marquez, Milan Kundera, JRR Tolkein, Roald Dahl, Haruki Murakami, Manto, Ismat Chugtai (God, I’m really mixing them up!) et al and flirted with Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai, Naipaul, Calvino, Ben Okri, Paul Auster, James Joyce, Kafka, Foucault and many others, without actually managing to finish anything by them. I have also lately been drawn to non fiction, such as the writings of Gandhi, Arundhati Roy, Pavan Verma, Naomi Klein, Malcolm Gladwell and Ramchandra Guha among others. (These are all off the top of my head, it’s hardly the full list. At any rate its easy to see how meager it is.) But the problem now is that I’m awfully slow-anything I start takes so long to finish, I forget where it started!

My attention span has actually reduced over the years… is this something to do with the times we live in? If that is so, and it’s a reasonable assumption, then I’m very glad to have lived through the transition phase, having experienced enough of the old, pre liberalization (for I guess that’s where things really started to change) era of the black and white TVs and limited distractions to actually appreciate that way of life, and not too late for the new Internet age, though I still feel like quite the relic as compared to my younger geeky cousins. I belong to the generation that actually played in the streets, not on PS and XBox consoles and under coaches in Sports Clubs. And read real books, not files on Kindle.

Short attention span notwithstanding, I do still read obsessively. I have to read the newspaper in the morning, otherwise I’m grouchy. If you try making conversation with me while I’m reading the newspaper, I’m still grouchy. I still open up old books just to smell the pages. I happily lap up interesting stuff posted by friends online, mostly on fb and some on their blogs, which I subscribe to. I lose my way often with StumbleUpon. On shoots, you can find me reading articles on my phone (thank God for technology.) Heck, I’ll even read labels on bottles, and medical charts while waiting for the doctor in the waiting room. (And that really is not saying very much for the reading I do these days!!)

I don’t know how and when I lost the habit of reading. And it makes me really sad that I did. I hate it! I remember a time as a teenager, when I was ordered to go to bed because it was way past bedtime, but I was at this crucial point in the story, so I finished the book under the rajai in torchlight. (Yes, I know a lot of you have done that as well.) I just wish I knew how to be that way again.