Books and Leisure

As a school-going child the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) was the best gift anyone could give me. Over time, by applying various techniques like coaxing, crying, behaving well, throwing tantrums, i managed to build up an enviable collection of these comics, courtesy my parents. Stories that unfolded before me through those illustrative pages were that of Nal Damayanti, Shakuntala, Bhagat Singh, Rana Pratap, Prithviraj Chauhan, Dashavtaar, Tulsidas, Subhas Chandra Bose. I am not so sure if kids today grow up on this staple diet. If they do not, they are sure missing a very very exciting part of childhood. As i started exhausting my read list of ACK, somewhere in the early 80's came along Tinkle. That was a rage again. Kalia the crow, Supandi and other characters are still fresh in my mind. From my fellow brethren in boarding school, we borrowed stuff like Chacha Chaudhri, Mandrake, Phantom, Flash Gordon, Superman, Spiderman, Asterix, Tintin et al. (all these were a strict no-no for my parents). Chacha Chaudhri and Sabu were hugely popular characters and the guys who brought them to the boarding school after vacations, were assured of king size treatment through the term. Hmm...where did we leave this all behind.

I remember my Mom buying me books like "Stories from the Ramayana". That was a illustrative book, but had long paragraphs of text, which me and my sister lapped up furiously. Mahabharata followed, we read it again and again. Taking a cue, she next brought a collection of
"Bhakti" short stories. That one misfired. Because, we had by then taken up regular visits to the school libraries and had started discovering very well packaged pictorial story books, Cindrella, Alice in Wonderland (i never liked this story), Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Three Musketeers, Don Quixote. For me the smell of Victorian England still is similar to what a Charles Dickens hardbound library volume smelt like, the first time i borrowed it from the library. When we started raising our bar higher on the classics side, we stumbled across works like "Great Expectations" ( i never completed this book). Time for another inflection.

Asterix made a comeback, along with Enid Blyton (Famous Five). Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys followed. I was in standard 7th or 8th then. Still, coming back for vacations from the boarding school, i used to randomly borrow the ACK from the kid nearby (if the possessive brat refused, i used to appeal to his/her parents good offices). The ACK affliction remained, although it was embarrassing to ask my parents to buy one for me. So, at school it was detective stories, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys with an occasional Agatha Christie thrown in. At home it was either the epics or the venerable "Statesman", "Amrita Bazar Patrika" or "The Illustrated Weekly of India", that my Dad subscribed to. Amrita Bazar was fast, the modern day tabloid, while the Statesman was an institution. Staid, and with a stiff upper lip. Thus started my involvement with Newspapers. From then on the floodgates really opened up, R.K Narayan, Sidney Sheldon, James Headly Chase (with the paper cover atop the book for obvious reasons), Harold Robbins, Somerset Maugham, Charles Dickens (revisited), Maxim Gorky, Ruskin Bond, The Bronte Sisters, Anton Chekov, DH Lawrence, Leon Uris, Robin Cook, Kahlil Gibran, Mulk Raj Anand we read anything that we could lay our hands on. Those were good good times.

The second inflection point was when i was doing my graduation. Politics, Biography, Espionage, History, Trivia, Sports, Movies and the Mystic started appealing. Even if it was fiction, something as staid as Ayn Rand occupied prime space. That was the time of unlearning everything that the politically correct NCERT text books taught us in school. So, be it the World Wars, The Battles of Panipat, The Mughal Rule, Henry the VIII, Anne Boleyn, King Arthur, Hitler, Ceasar, American War of Independence, i saw everything in a new fleshed out version. Newspapers were slowly occupying a greater "Top of the mind" what with political tumult of those times, and the articles of Arun Shourie, MV Kamath, Ashok Mitra, Vir Sanghvi, MJ Akbar, Nihal Singh, DN Bezboruah (the editor of "The Sentinel", the local english newspaper i read in Assam"), Kuldeep Nayyar et al. The mind was in a churn and all of these journos really shaped the political thought process that was shaping up. With Bofors, Reforms -Part I, Mandal and other key political debates raging at that time, it was goodbye to that fantastic old world of books. I took to current affairs magazines and tabloids, as they came. Then, MBA happened. So Philip Kotler, Tom Peters, CK Prahalad, Harvard Business Review and others occupied center stage. And then there was the sermonising world of Stephen Covey. Like everything that has to do with business, i thought that this posturing was skin deep, meant to motivate so called "out of depth" wannabe achievers. I did not spend money on a single such "self help" books, and i still believe that Economics is a nuanced science and Management is an art that is intuitive which challenges you analytically and emotionally. Rest is theory, which is useful, if you can select what will best suit you for a specific decision scenario. What is left is just baggage and balderdash.

Ok, so the world of books are a distant memory these days. Once in a few months, we visit our friendly neighborhood "Crossword" store and try to relive the past. When we come out, we leave that past behind. BTW, i found an ACK at "Crossword" with its seal broken, that was "Rana Sanga". Had fun reading through it. I cannot wait for my daughter to grow up so that we can together embark into the exciting world of ACK, once again.