Everybody says reading is a good habit, an art by itself, a great pastime, a door towards knowledge,it must be inculcated in children from very young days, blah, blah blah........Personally i am not very sure... My expierience tells me otherwise....Though one sentence is ofcource correct...about it opening the doors to knowledge...(information,might be a better word here).....Only i wonder if knowledge is such a good thing?....and what kind of knowledge?.....These days, i am coming to the conclusion that the surest way to happiness is through ignorance....
I think, this fine art of reading is also a hereditary sort of thing...My maternal grandmother was said to have been a voracious reader...She was said to have used to preserve the paper bags that came with provisions and read them....My mother inherited that...I remember her devouring weeklies,novels,classics,in the short free time she could catch between her busy household duties of presiding over a brood of five temperamental kids,.. attending on a demanding husband,...( she had to run after dad with a towel as he went for his bath...He was so royal in his habits that he could not be bothered with trivial details like carrying a towel for the bath)..and to round it off, looking after an extremely fierce dog....
I myself took to this pastime as a duck takes to water...and do"nt take this as bragging...For i now regret it and wish i had"nt.....As a girl of eight,(student of third class,) i used to read the serials of ANDHRA PRABHA and PATHRIKA...I can still remember some instances of them...Dad used to be proud of this and he egged me on further by subscribing to the M>S>co pocket books,,,..and i lost my self in the excitement of the adventures of ALLARi GOPI -_ADBHUTHA YATRA, Alladdin"s lamp, and umpteen others, so much so that the class books seemed tame in comparison to the thrills provided by the fiction....Needless to say, the studies suffered.....
And there was no looking back to this spree of reading...As i grew up , i , seriously followed the current serials in the popular magazines,graduated to novels,---yaddanapudi, koduri,dwivedula, latha--- to classics,---chalam, viwanatha,sarath,-- veered to mystery and made mincemeat of detective yugandhar, parasuram, narsan,enjoyed the breezy puranam sitha, rachakonda viswanatha sastry,ravuri,....
When introduced to the english literature,i made it a hobby to exhaust the entire works of specific authors,.... Dickens, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle,chase,earlier Harold Robbins, Sheldon's,..what not.... i impartially read everything,.. fiction, philosophy,mystery,and hunting too,---Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson-- though i never saw a real gun in all the 48 yrs of my life, and tigers and cheetahs only in zoos.... ..
And i can not say if i am any the better, having read so much...Except for the sheer enjoyment i derived from reading, i did not seem to have developed as a person, and only got bad eyes to show as a result ...Not only that,...i do"nt think all this stood me in good stead for the forthcoming eventualities of life ...I have a suspicion that excessive reading made a person flighty...I generally saw that people who read a great deal of philosophy mistook themselves to be very virtuous--..I knew a man who read a lot on medicine and thought he was a virtual doctor....he used to gather patients from his place and personally took them to specialists...He used to show off and talk knowledgeably with them before those patients and interrupted them often with his own prognosis,...till the poor docs, unable to bear it any longer, stopped him with a polite word or two...
So, when i had a daughter, i took that extra care to see my daughter never indulged in this addiction and saw to it that she strictly read nothing more than the stories in her text books ... sometimes, she exhibited such an unholy appreciation of them that it bothered me with vague apprehension....Thankfully Anasuya had never shown any inclination towards it... Sometimes she got carried away by her friends and attempted to read some of the best sellers,but fortunately got tired very soon .. It delighted me when she yawned after ten pages of Da Vinci Code and wondered why the author made such long descriptions....I was secretly pleased when she read few episodes of Kenneth Anderson,pronounced them as very good, but gave a wide berth to other episodes... ....
She studied well, and has become an earthier person than me, i am glad to say...
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