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The next restriction to be imposed on me would be that I wouldn't be able to read for a whole month after surgery till they gave me my new reading glasses.
I thought this a bit thick and wondered if I would survive it.
Of late my reading has been to escape from talking, and thinking...hard thoughts...
I was never a voracious reader but a compulsive one alright. At school I never read anything other than school books and that too a day before the Quarterlies, 2 days before Half-yearlies and 3 days before the Annuals. Those days reading for exams meant mugging and kids of that age are pretty good at it.
Once in a while Father would gift me kids' books like Lorna Doone and Tom Brown's School Days and I read them wistfully with awe...the awakening.
Things changed when I went to my University at Vizagh. We had English Literature for all of 2 years and had to wade through as many as 17 books. But that made all the difference. Reading is a matter of cultivated taste like arithmetic and needs compulsion before you acquire a felicity for it.
But I didn't read any newspapers though. The Hindu was meant for my granpa.
At IIT KGP I was rather forlorn with lots of time hanging on my hands. And started reading The Statesman in the lounge of the Faculty Hostel. And I discovered that very few read it cover to cover...many would glance through the headlines and toss it aside. Others would turn to the Sports Page which then had cricket and football and little else. One old gentleman retired and re-employed would turn to the Business Page and spend hours peering through the Stocks and Shares fine prints. And once I ventured to ask him what it was that so engrosses him there. And he replied with a proverb in Telugu:
"What does the donkey know about ittar perfume?"
And we used to get Readers Digest and Time and Newsweek in our Faculty Club. There was only one gent who read them cover to cover. I used to subscribe to RD and wade through its fillers and humor pages but soon found them as boring as physics.
In our University there were notices (much before TV) once in a while that an upcoming poet would be reading his latest set of poems in the Senate Hall and all were invited. I gave them an eminent miss.
But one evening I was caught by my Shakespeare Uncle who dragged me there because he was the invitee and would be reading from his English Mahabharat. And found that there were just a handful other than the reader and his hosts. I always thought that literature and in particular poetry is an intensely personal affair not to be peddled like Rexona and Moods.
And I recalled PGW in Leave it to Psmith:
"The information, authoritatively conveyed to him during breakfast by Lady Constance, that he was scheduled that night to read select passages from Ralston McTodd's Songs of Squalor to the entire house-party assembled in the big drawing room, had come as a complete surprise to Psmith, and to his fellow guests-----Among these members of the younger set the consensus of opinion was that it was a bit thick, and that at such a price even the lavish hospitality of Blandings was scarcely worth having. Only those who had visited the castle before during the era of her ladyship's flirtation with Art could have been described as resigned. These stout hearts argued that while this latest blister was going to be pretty bad, he could hardly be worse than the chappie who had lectured on Theosophy last November, and must almost of necessity be better than than the bird who during the Shiffley race week had attempted in a two-hour discourse to convert them to vegetarianism."
One thing worse than reading one's stuff aloud is to have it read out by others aloud in public.
I had this experience when a few years ago I visited my IAS B-i-L at his hotel in Hyderabad. He wanted to have a copy of my piece (as we writers call it) that appeared in the Now & Again column of the Statesman: In Praise of Laziness.
There were lots of people of both sexes from all over the world in his room as they gathered there for a family conference. And as I discreetly handed the file to my B-i-L, his brother who is an eminent surgeon in London and had just then been conferred the OBE by the Queen took it over from him.
And started reading it aloud for the company.
And I was blushing pink with embarrassment. There was this sentence in it when I called Sherlock Holmes a 'lazy bum' who was always fiddling with his violin and getting stoned with his cocaine pricks.
As the OBE came to that sentence he halted a bit, but like the OBE he was, he changed the 'bum' into 'man'...
In London 'bum' is apparently forbidden in genteel company since the popular meaning of the word happens:
'Buttocks'...Queen size...
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