Reading

The Many Pleasures Of Reading

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Last month a dear friend gifted me a book. A physical one. With smells, sounds and good old paper. It has pages that I can dog-ear. And write my notes. Circle. Underline. Etc.  And so, have revisited the pleasures of reading a physical book. It has done wonders to my reading. 

It didn’t quite start that way. When I unwrapped the gift to see books, the first thought was, where do I keep them? Skirmishes at home about my books and the space they occupy have been persistent. Peace has been wrought by sticking to the kindle. Until these books arrived.  

So, I left these books on a side table. I had to figure out how to get back to caressing a book while devouring what it held. Perhaps in the hesitating was a fear of falling in love with the physical book again. 

One of the books seemed to tug at me.  Chandrahas Choudhury’s “My Country Is Literature”.

 The back cover had this.

“A book is only one text, but it is many books. It is a different book for each of its readers. My Anna Kareninais not your Anna Karenina; your A House for Mr Biswas is not the one on my shelf. When we think of a favourite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters who touched our hearts, the rhythm and texture of the sentences. We recall our own circumstances when we read it: where we bought it (and for how much), what kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the story began to intermingle with scenes from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation or allowed us to make our peace with some great private discord. This is the second life of the book: its life in our life.”

Those lines were enough to shed my romance and dive into experiencing the sensuous pleasures that only a book can kindle. Sorry about the stupid pun.

Anyway, I have read been devouring with great relish. This book is a collection of literary criticisms on the works of an esoteric set of writers. Perumal Murugan. Orhan Pamuk. Sadat Hasan Manto. Nehru. Junichiro Tanizaki. Manu Joseph. And several others.

I have been slow reading. Rereading. Fast reading. Beginning all over again. There is no bar at the bottom of the page that tells me I have finished 43% of the book. The volume of fresh pages on my right palm are inviting by their weight and crisp edges. So I go slow. 

A Library Of Emotions For The Pleasures Of Reading

In the middle of all this, another dear friend sent this message on whatsapp.

“I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their pages.

Speaking about Bishop Berkeley (who, may I remind you, was a prophet of the greatness of America), I remember he wrote that the taste of the apple is neither in the apple itself—the apple cannot taste it- self—nor in the mouth of the eater. It requires a contact between them.

The same thing happens to a book or to a collection of books, to a library. For what is a book in itself? A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”

Borges, Jorge Luis, from his book This craft of verse

My mind right now is like a meadow sprouting all kinds of green after a luxurious spell of afternoon rain. And as dusk falls, birds and insects chirp away. Strange calls and uncommon sounds seem to festoon the night ahead as I look at the pages ahead. A strange set of emotions that are beyond the stuff in the common library of emotions.

That’s what reading a book does to me. How I love “what have you been reading lately?” to bibliophiles like Manu!

The many pleasures of reading are best left unexplained. For explanation does it more harm than good. I can say that with certainty after writing all this.

Chipmunks and me

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Alvin and the chipmunks, the movie series, brought alive a different world! the world of chipmunks. Chipmunks are from the squirrel family and have impish energy to themselves that is an easy allure. The movie brought them more sheen. I like them for a different reason. There is something that is common between the chipmunks and me. 

Chipmunks hibernate. Or so I thought. They shut down and conserve energy. Then I learnt that they don’t actually hibernate. They get into ‘torpor’. There is a difference between hibernation and torpor. Let’s leave it at, torpor is ‘hibernation-lite’. Heres an excerpt from an interesting essay that I read. “torpor is a survival tactic used by animals to survive the winter months. It also involves a lower body temperature, breathing rate, heart rate, and metabolic rate.”

First, torpor is a survival tactic. It lasts for brief spells. Chipmunks and me share torpor. My version of torpor has been to go silent on social platforms. Twitter. Instagram. Facebook and such else. 

A nightmare as a trigger.

It started with a nightmare I had one night, a few months back.  My recollections of the nightmare are blurred and brief. All I know is that I woke up with a start. In that nightmare, friends appeared. They sported bright red straw hats marching to a tune from a horror movie. A horror movie that was badly made too.  There was venom in their tongue and they kept dipping into a bucket full of poison and smearing it on people. They told me it is a game and invited me to play while jiving to a wicked war dance number. 

I remember waking up with a start and don’t remember other parts of the nightmare. 

Over the next few weeks, there were other pressing demands placed on my calendar.  The intensity of my work and some waves of hospital visits due to family requirements made it apparent that I had to work things differently.  Logging out of most social media and reorganising my time was easy picking.

This isn’t the first time. For the past couple of years, I take 2-3 weeks that I shut down and maintain some level of silence online. It is far from something grand and sexy like a ‘detox’. Closer to being weary, accompanied by a sense of loss and nostalgia of the good old early days of social media and the internet. 

This year, my silence was more pronounced. I would barely surface to write The OWL Despatch,  the newsletter for Founding Fuel and a clutch of other commitments like this one. This so happens to be the times of the Coronavirus and the recommendation of social distancing. I am clear that social distancing in the real world does not merit a universal embracing of everything in the social media world. In fact, the social media world has to be handled with even more care now.

Noticing my noticing. 

Looking back, I have wrested peace from the jaws of ceaseless online noise. Vainglory with a veneer of humility. Shameless bigotry, bias and bile. Fake news. All worn with pride. Medal worthy epaulettes if you will. 

When the apps are off the phone and the phone is off my palms there are other things that I am more present to. The love of colour and fear of the that keeps my daughter company. The extra wrinkle in an elder’s face. Kids of neighbours who suddenly seemed taller when I see them in elevators. I have been noticing that I have been noticing far more!  Including the receding sounds of chatter in my mind. 

As I resurface this time, the terms I have set for myself are stiffer. There is an abundant realisation that what gets into my stream of attention should not be only stuff of use, but stuff that keeps me sane. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Linkedin. WhatsApp. All the same. So I have been on a hacking spree. Unfollow. Mute. Exit. Reorganise WhatsApp presence in groups. A few are fun. Some are useful. I have lost count of the useless. 

I resurface yet again from torpor. There is a feeling of greater peace and a sense of what it means to live.

The quiet time has also given me a sense of peace and added to layers of depth to writing and reading. I have plans to read more books than last year and indulge in better conversations face to face. So what if it they are mediated by technology. More writing too!  

For all the lovely folks who reached out and checked if everything was alright, well, thank you. Your mails, texts and calls meant a lot. These days, I am ever so lighter in the mind and wish I could transfer this lightness to the body as well. That is a different story! 

Image Credit : Steve Orlowski from Pixabay 

The written word moves !

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That’s the vehicle that i spot often. Near home. A mobile book store, which for some reason, i thought of as a library. For English & Marathi books. It has a generator, a computer, a young boy and of course, some books.

Plus, they advertise a number. A Toll Free number. You need a book, well, you just dial a book and it would be home delivered.

Now, that was a first.

For all the years of metro living, everything used to get home delivered. From grocery to DVDs, to letters, credit card statements to Chicken Curry. But books…. Well, perhaps the magazines from the corner store. But books ?!?

I didn’t see them being home delivered. And that included the ones that went out of the door, borrowed by friends and other visitors, exploiting my inability of saying http://healthsavy.com/product/cialis/ ‘no’ ! And i used to awaken with hope each day, that perhaps that day, i would see a book coming back home ! But thats another story.

To spot this mobile book store was heartening. And to actually spot people frequenting the van was even more !

With TV, Internet, audio books and such other ‘advancements’, there is a strange impasse in the world. I think. An impasse that’s big enough to obscure the joy of smelling fresh pages, of curling in a corner with a book, of looking up a dictionary, of debating a point with a friend and just soak up thoughts & adore styles !

This mobile book store seemed to bring a whiff of fresh air ! Mobility takes a new meaning ! The written word moves ! On wheels !

“A dead giveaway”

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I was on a flight from Delhi when i read the Hindustan Times and its editorial page. This piece was interesting enough for me to do a cut and paste job. So am keying this in. Courtesy, HT.
“The dead usualy throw up more interesting points for debate than the living. Take the ongoing quible about whether Mahatma Gandhi’s dying words uttered after being shot by Nathuram Godse were ‘Ram, Ram’ – as recorder by the FIR registered after the assassination or ‘Hey Ram’ as made iconic and cast in stone at Rajghat.
It is a fact that sometimes, a public figure’s last words are tweaked or cooked up to fit the popular image of the person. It would have been rather banal, for insance, if Bapu had uttered a single ‘Oh!” or no word at all when he died. But that would have hardly satisfied us.
Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart not having said, “I should have never switched from scotch to martinis,” on his deathbed ? Or the ironic, Byronic last lines of Lord Buron not being, “Now i shall go to sleep. Goodnight”?
There have been official disappointments though. Winston Churchill was expected to make a herioc ‘blood, sweat and tears’ kind of last speech before going into a coma that would find him resting Adolf Hitler nine days later. But Churchill said, “I am bored with it all,” a punk credo that would have suited Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious much better.
Some dying lines are downright boring. Charles Darwin should have come up with something more evolutionary instead of teh slightly maudlin: “I am not the least afraid to die.” Far better – dying up to expectations – was Oscar Wilde: “Either that wallpaper goes, or i do”
Considering that not too many people are always taking notes and cross checking even when a famous person posps it, its rather remarkable thatt we have so many last lines to savour. As for Gandhiji, we are puttin gour bets on ‘hey Ram’. Why change something that works?”