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Books and the beautiful forevers


Growing up in the 1990's in Bangalore  before cable TV had encroached upon our lives and the internet was still a thing of the future meant growing up with books. Especially, if your sibling was 6 years younger there was only one thing to do during the vacations in summer when you weren't with friends - read.

The first book I owned and treasured was a second hand collection of short stories written by Enid Blyton. How I loved that book! I read and re-read every story in that book until I could tell them by memory. By the age of 9, I started off on the adventures of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five. Enid Blyton was easily the biggest influence of my childhood. I dream't of having my own adventure club and living in the English countryside with its rolling hills and gentle moors and having an outlandishly romantic name like Jane. I even had the name of my adventure series ready - it was to be called The Fabulous Four.

As with other convent educated children, English was not only the language of my schoolbooks but also the language of my private life. I played with my friends in English, watched shows and movies in English and read in English. There were a few Indian publications that were also a part of my childhood. These included Chandamama, Champak, Tinkle and Gokulam, apart from the several versions of traditional tales like the Mahabharat and Ramayan, tales of Akbar and Birbal, and the South Indian equivalent of Tenali Ramakrishna which were part of the Amar Chitra Katha series.

As I grew older and gained broader access to literature, I gradually transitioned into reading Agatha Christie, Sydney Sheldon, R.K. Narayan, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Charles Dickens and then the list goes on with authors like Mario Puzo, William Dalrymple, Vikram Seth, Khaled Hosseini.  On the comic front, I moved from Tinkle to the more sophisticated Tintin, Asterix and Obelix and Calvin and Hobbes. I discovered Dilbert after I started working, when I could appreciate it more.

When I look back at my life, I realize how much books have influenced my thinking, my attitude and shaped my life. Books gave me access to distant worlds and different lives. Lives I could never live, emotions I couldn't feel, places I could never visit - I lived through all these on lazy afternoons curled up in a chair or my bed. Books have enriched my life and I hope to read a lot more in life - and hopefully one day be able to write one too.

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