Fractional Distillates - 4

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Our next distillate is Kerosene. 

And for books, this distillate is the by and large extinct species of readers we used to call Bookworms:




 


  http://passion2read.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/bookworm-pictures/

Webster says a bookworm is a person who prefers reading to just about any other activity. I had the rare privilege of watching a few of them during my childhood and youth. 

Let me take the case of Mr X. Something happened to him in Class VII when he first met with an Oxford Junior Atlas. And he started poring through it page by page, plot by plot, figure by figure, country by country, and continent by continent in their Physical as well as Political Maps with a lens in his pocket. For the rest of the year, a copy of this Atlas was in his bag and he used to surreptitiously browse it like we used to do Yugandhar Detective booklets. 

As he grew up he got so much more and more interested in general reading that he used to skip Drill Classes, Games Classes, Drawing Classes, Craft Classes and Moral Instruction Classes and sit under our school's neem tree where his juniors used to play Monkey-Drops, with a fat book or two that he borrowed from our miniature school library. By the time we passed out of school, I am sure he finished reading the entire lot.

Later, I used to meet him in trains. And he would be caught reading anything from Kafka to Archie's Comics sitting by the window. By then he became a chain-smoker. His bag was more likely to have a couple of Alvin Tofflers or Alistair MacLeans than a shaving kit or a bedsheet and a rubber pillow. 

This is for reserve. At every important Junction he would get down and run straight, not to the coffee shop like the rest of us, but to the Wheelers or Higginbothams to pick up anything new from Vivekananda Speeches to Romain Rolland.

By then he would have acquired a set and three spare pairs of soda-bottle specs.

And therein lies the secret of most bookworms I knew: they didn't know it in their childhood but they are born short-sighters (myopics) and their 'sight' grows exponentially as they age...it is a sort of vicious circle. Their myopia makes them unsuitable for rough and ready games or watching movies in tent-theaters or ogling. But they are very happy reading books keeping them as close to their eyes as possible, and with the strain, it worsens and the Power grows and they have to use thicker and thicker glasses for seeing anything but books.  

As to whether they enjoy their reading, I can't say, because the few I met with declined to talk about the books they were reading.  But reading was their only hobby and they were happy to spend their spare time and money on it.

Why I say this species may be extinct is because nowadays we have laptops, palmtops, e-books (?), tablets (?)  and the inexhaustible internet which can be browsed (as I do nowadays) by increasing the font size as much as one wants by pressing repeatedly Ctrl +++

I first heard of Internet (web) while I was watching an interview on TV with  Junglie Kapoor. By then he retired entirely from Bollywood, had acquired a huge torso and a triple chin, had several malas round his neck and at least two rings on each finger. And when he was asked how he spends his ample leisure, he said: "I browse the web" (or was it surf the net?). I was amazed that such a thing was at all possible 24/7. 

But then my student who went to Princeton, took his Ph D, got married, set up a family, and started living with his  Chandigarh home-maker wife told me he bought a computer and took a net-connection and, apparently even then, the web had enough material to while away those long hours when her hubby was at work.

So, bookworms are now replaced by webticks...

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Apologies

My cousin GMK Sharma phoned in this evening to acknowledge receipt of the latest Ishani booklet. I recall talking about him in a couple of blogs, once giving me a cute 'lesson' in Metallurgy. Nowadays he told me that he follows this blog and wanted to say that I have been rather rash in attacking once or twice the revered Goswami Tulsidas in connection with that verse taught me by my UP Brahmin friend Tyagi where he says women are as fit to be drubbed as drums, cattle and untouchables.

GMK must be knowing. Like I spent 40 years at IIT KGP, he did the same in BHU, Varanasi, and retired as a Professor of Metallurgy.

Apparently there was a recurring debate in Varanasi where TD composed his Ramcharit Manas as to how TD of all people could express such views in his venerated text.

And well-read pundits found that the said couplet doesn't represent TD's own views or  those of his principal characters, but  mouthed by an insignificant character in passing.

Were TD a politician, he would possibly have said he was 'quoted out of context'.

So, here are my profound apologies to whosoever is offended by my lighthearted TD quote out of context. 

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