Saturday, 9 May 2015
Time of my life-1
I believe there was a time in all of our lives when we discovered books, novels mostly and we were voracious readers.
We read whatever was in our houses, local library, kabadi wala dukan and other places. This happened to me when i was
in my 10 th class and a little before that. I father was in Army then and we had a nice library maintained by the
Artillery Centre. This was my paradise. Earlier in my 8th and 9th I used to read mostly general knowledge books and
Ripley's Believe it or not, its not that I did not know about novels but I always that 'who in the world will have
time to read so big stories. I had read short stories, a little long stories which were sometimes boring and then I
considered novels as exteneded versions of long stories. That was why i avoided them and chose to read Guinness Records
and stuff like that. But then some radical transformation happened with my first novel. I guess it was the Alchemist.
Read it in one single night straight. Mostly because the english was simple to understand and the story seemed nice.
And also due to the fact that I was religious at that time ,or was it that I became religious after reading Alchemist.
Anyways, it was beautifully written novel which was totally unreal ending and which made me laugh with happiness like
Santiago was already doing. A possible that I was hooked to it was also that it was set in a charismatic location with
the winds and oasis and pyramids and scimitars and a loose boy which did not give a fuck about the world, just wanted
to graze some cattles. That novel also gave me the idea to become a farmer in life, which i still am attached to.
That was probably my first real novel,if you don;t count Roald Dahl a little long stories which always excited me.
He was one fine writer who managed to take the suspense till the end and make it romantically tragic. One which i
remember is the story in which they make an automatic grammatizer which writes stories and all. there was this other one
in which they catch a lot of roosters by sedating them only to discover them waking up before the owner. These were fun
stories and Matilda too. I sort of related to Matilda. Once the first novel was read, all others were like coconut water
to me. Kept of reading. Afterthought compels me to mention non-real novels I read before Alchemist like Enid Blyton's
Famous Five and Secret Seven. God, those were something. It being a big library, there were lot of Famous Five stories
there, possibly all and there was not a single one that I hadn't read. I guess it gave the sense of adventure which
every teenager craved for in their lives and it had lot of food mentioned in it like lemonade and cookies in tin cans
and stuff which got me to idea of reading enid blyton with something to drink, mostly lemonade or some chocobar to eat.
I used to go to this night school for some random stuff and it was far from home, 5 maybe 7 kilometers and I used to cycle
back and forth everyday to that place. I always used to go there early and read Enid Blyton in empty classrooms alongside
the window with rains pouring. Those were some nice days. But then came lot of Paulo Coelho, this was after Alchemist
and each of his novels became shittier than the one before. He talked about random stuff. But there was one good novel
which he wrote, called Eleven Minutes. It was about this prostitute in France or Switzerland, who wrote about her life.
It was an erotic novel which was a good reason to liking it but it had some really nice stories in it. And it was almost
poetic to me. Then the other novel i liked of his was Devil and Miss Prymm. Then I read Dan Brown and most of his novels
and came up this brilliant idea that an author pretty much writes the same stuff over and over again. This idea was
mainly influenced by Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown and some other people. Then there was this other novel I was hooked to
called 'A series of unfortunate events', it was 13 or 16 book collection of short hardbound books which were all there
in our army library and don't I remember waiting to issue one book after another after every week. You see we were allowed
to issue 3 books per week. Count Olaf I started to hate and I was scared of him, I mean he was such an artist that you
would see him appearing until he decided to reveal himself but then Violet and Sunny and other dude were clever and all.
I was seriously scared of Count Olaf, the way he killed Montgomery,the herpetologist and the way he deceived people.
I really loved Lemony Snickett's collection of books. Strangely i had this idea that i was never able to chech taht he
was in jail when he wrote these books. Then came 10th standard and people pressuring to study and what to do with life
and all other crap which comes with it. I was so much full of people telling me to get good marks in 10th saying that
it was the start of life and what not. The person who came to help me at that point was Osho. He had this awesome collection
of books on various topics like Joy, Intuition and other subject which made me really philosophical and religious which
is mostly also the tendency when we want to escape our present situation. Osho was a way out. He told everything that
contradicted what my parents said and it was nice because i thought that i was not the only person who thought my parents
uttered bullshit. Then came the 10th boards, the finals. Did I mention that I got hooked to Harry potter somewhere in my s
starting of 10th and was on Deathly Harrows ,don't even know if this title is correct, before my math final exam. and god
i so much i enjoyed reading about Hogwarts and the war and Voldemort and his visions and others.
That was some great times and those are not over. I have these nice feelings every now and then.Like last semester, I was
reading Murakami's, Norwegian Woods before some exam. It was cold winter night and Murakami made a perfectly depressing
night. This was all a nice experience. I hope my curiosity to know stories does not die down. I keep on reading.
And perhaps contribute some day too.
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