for the lOve of books and reading

                  “What  I  say is a town isn’t a town without bookstore. It may call itself a town,but   unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.”

   -         Neil Gaiman

   

                  A good bookshop is just a genteel BlackHole- that knows how to read.”  

                                                                                          - Terry Pratchett

When  i was  a student of Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkatta) in the mid 1990s, a good friend of mine once took me to hi old house- about 85 kilometres from Kolkatta. The oldhouse was still unlived in after the family shifted  elsewhere more than twenty years ago. We chanced upon a bundle of old magazines, books and school notebooks that were piled up in an obscure corner in a room adjoining the kitchen. My curiosity could not stop me from prying that open – and to our delight there was a collection of issues of the Illustrated Weekly Of India and the Reader’s Digest dating back to the 1960s. I sat down then and  there and started flipping through them. When we returned to Calcutta  I had yet another pack of reading material. Carefully dusted and aired to get rid of the humidity that had inevitably permeated in between the pages, these magazines have  since then found a place in my bookshelf. I have vividly read some of the articles of interest to me, a few of which I still remember having gone through in those days.

I love books and reading.

When i passed my ICSE(Xth class) examination  in First division, well-wishers and relatives showered me with cash gifts of over Rs. 2,500. With that amount,  my mom sent me to Guwahati to buy new clothes. At Guwahati i spent my time in visiting bookshops in Pan Bazar area. Luckily I found a ramshackle building that housed  new and old books in Chennikuthi area of the city. I was happy to find William Black’s Life Of Goldsmith and the unabridged The Vicar of Wakefield.  I love the Vicar of Wakefield since I was a student of standard fifth. Fr. Minj at the Donbosco School in Golaghat  frequently cited the biblical observation of Dr.Primrose: “I have been young, and now I am old; yet never saw I the righteous man forsaken or his seed begging their bread.” This observation, according to him, gave his poverty-striken father’s faith and fortitude as he  was struggling against odds in the maintenance of a big family. As I lapped it up Dr.Primrose and his merry wife and children had become to me my dream companions.

My month long stay at Bezbaruah khura’s(uncle) residence in Guwahati was spent in reading TS Eliot, Keats, Byron, Musset, Verlaine, Pope and others, and forget all about new clothes.I sat all day on a cement bench beside the Dighali Pukhri absorbed in books, quite oblivious of the outside world, enjoying blissful happiness. Perhaps the words of Wordsworth that  "Books are a substantial world wherein solid happiness can grow.” seem to have made a deep impress on my young mind. It was here that I first read Tales From Scott which  introduced  me to the charm and fascination of the narratives of the Wizard of the North. I can still quote lines learnt in those days.I had also got by heart the entire ballad Edwin And Angelina and adopted the form in an English poem on the sacrifice of Jwhwlao Doimalu.

I am an inveterate collection of books and reading material, literally anything and everything. I have plenty of books that were brought from the pavement in College Street in Calcutta for prices ranging from five to fifty rupees. College Street is probably so named because it houses many of the colleges that form part of the University of Calcutta which is found on that street. Booksellers line both sides of the pavement for almost a kilometre, and best of all they are open quite late at night, so one is in no rush and can browse leisurely to the heart’s content. I bought HG Well’s Outline Of World History and  Edward Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of the Roman Empire for just Rs 65 and Rs.120 respectively. I also bought three great biographies which have remained my favourites – Boswell’s Life Of Johnson, Lockhart’s Life Of Scott, and Trevalyan’s Life Of Macaulay. I still read these books from time to time. As far as books are concerned, they defy the adage that familiarity breeds contempt: in fact it’s quite the contrary.

Books are indeed the most faithful companions; they never backbite, never shout back, never get angry or have moods. They are available to delight and give solace at any time of the day or night, and never resent being handled and fondled – some books are indeed objects of dear love. One such is Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the anthology of poems in English which was the standard book for English poetry at Scindia School when I was a student. A friend took my copy then and never returned. Five years later i was in one of my favourite bookshops in Connaught Place in New Delhi when I came upon a facsimile edition of Palgrave’s – a hardbound copy for all of Rs.30 and it was the last copy there. No need to say that I immediately almost lapped it up!

Wherever I have travelled, and even if would be around for only a few days, I make it my business to find the bookshops around, and all my spare time is then spent on them. To places that I have returned frequentlyi have my favourite haunts, but as new outlets keep opening up, I keep busy visiting them also as time permits.In Shillong too, i was a constant visitor to the Government Public library, and it was my special delight to cruise through the authors in the open shelves. For all the love i have for my state, this is one thing that i miss most, bookshops of the scale and variety that are found in big cities.To compensate i make it a point to visitSynod Bookroom in Mission Veng and bought books in Mizo- a good number of them translated from English. With a  modest knowledge of my father tongue i tasted some, swallowed others and some few,  i chewed and digested. Still, from time to time one comes upon a little gem, and one such that i went through which i bought at a “Variety” shop at Serchhip in 2004 is about Chinese Medicine And Ayurveda. I paid the lady  fifty rupees. She was very happy and so did i. As I flipped through my catch i was amazed to learn about the parallels found in these most ancient system of medicine.

When i was in London in 2005 for training Foyle’s on Tottenham Street had provided me plenty of hours of joy. One- atleast i - can spend whole day in such bases of tranquility and quiet recollection, where the sense of time is lost and all bodily sensations get automatically suppressed as one becomes engrossed moving from shelf to shelf and floor to floor. When I went to the US in late 2008, my Pakistani friend Huma Yusuf took me to Barns&Noble outlet in Times Square, New York where like the CroSSWord in City Center at Banjara Hills one can sit on the floor and read, or go upto the canteen and do so, return the book to the shelf and move on to the next. There is no obligation to buy any book – but who can leave without doing so!!! When my sister was shifted to Apollo Hospital, Hyderabad in July 2006 I used to sneaked out to AKSHAARA- in Srinagar Colony the and spent a few hours in rummaging through stack of books. I felt myself relax and suddenly at peace. There are many books at AKSHAARA that  all tastes are catered for, and personally, i have never missed picking my lot from the book sales sections  every time i have been there. One of my prized possession is An Anthology Of Mystical Verse which i bought in 2006 for only a few hundreds literally a pittance for a large volume beautifully hardbound. There have been many such  acquisitions and explorations – and many more to come still, of that  have no doubt.

But Nilamoni Baidew and  Himadri aunt once ask in 2005 when they look at my lined bookshelves. Baba, have read all these books?. Clearly, no is the obvious answer. Unlike Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, whose collection i have seen in Teenmurti House where he lived as Prime Minister and which is now a museum. There are thousands of books, and I picked up several at random: each that i did had been underlined at several places, with handwritten notes in ink in the margins. What a prolific reader he was!

Although i have not read all the books that i have, i have definitely flipped through all of them and picked up nuggets that i will be delighted to share with friends, students and readers in future. Five to ten years down the line, I dream of owning a big farm back in my benighted Cinderella state of Mizoram and start writing. A journey to discover ‘natural living’ through its various interconnected dimensions will also began side by side with writing. All those unread books will then become valuable references to which i  hope will turn with increasing frequency. So the answer is, yes, by the by all of them will be read nevertheless.Which means that i keep adding to my collection, on my own and courtesy my friend, who knowing my propensity and my reading tastes surprise me with ever more titles. Bless then! But now, i must go back to my shelf- and so more later.