I want to go back to simpler times..

..when 'keeping in touch' meant picking up the landline telephone to actually have a real conversation; when you tried to understand a person's character by getting to know them over time, rather than forming an impetuous first impression after a cursory glance at their social media handles.. 

..when school classes didn't have Whatsapp groups; when, if you had been absent from school, procuring the missed 'notes' meant visiting a classmate's home to copy it, or hurriedly gobbling up your lunch to make time for copying from the borrowed notebook of your bench-mate.. 

..when having nothing to do for a while would have led to sitting and gazing over whatever was happening outside the window, rather than tinkering with Windows.. 

..when the opportunity to look at someone's photo came only when they showed you the glossy print of the tangible physical copy (while you tried not to smudge it too much with your fingerprints); when there was no notion of a 'DP' and being able to see a person's picture without their knowledge would simply have been considered creepy.. 

..when children played on the streets among themselves and had never heard of playing AmongUs indoors.. 

..when 'bandwidth' would have made you think of waist size, 'cookie' of chocolate chips, 'followers' of disciples or stalkers, 'platform' of roadsides, 'tiktok' of clocks; when 'flash' would have come only from your torch, 'filters' would have been for your tea, 'feed' would have meant giving your baby food, and the only thing 'viral' would have been your cold.. 

..when, saying 'binge-watch','netflix', 'reddit' or 'retweet', would have made people think you were delirious with high fever; when writing 'flickr' and 'tumblr' would have made your teacher complain about your poor spelling.. 

..when weeks before summer vacation, your inbox would not have been suddenly bombarded with endless posters and advertisements for miraculous summer camps that promised to transform your child in the span of a few weeks into a multitalented Leonardo da Vinci, complete with expert coding, theatre and pottery skills, and superhuman memory power to boot.. 

..when people wrote full words and sentences instead of abbreviations; when, after sending a whole well-crafted paragraph of your opinion, you would not have got a reply that said "K".. 

..when people captured memories more in their heads than in their handheld devices..

..when the whole family watched the same show on the television together and someone would shout "come quickly, it's back!" if you had left to use the bathroom during the commercial break; when, if you missed an episode, you had to hear about it from your friends or colleagues the next day and would not have been able to catch up with it on Prime Video.. 

..when kids listened in awe to the tales from the lips of their grandparents, rather than the grandparents having to listen in awe as the kid impatiently showed them how to attach an image to an e-mail; when we learnt from the elderly instead of the elderly struggling to keep up with us.. 

..when letters were handwritten, food was home cooked and friendships were more real.

Yes, in present times, I know life would be highly inconvenient, even unsafe, without any of these things. Nevertheless, I cannot help wishing for just a small respite, a quick escape - to an alternate reality, a switch that went on and off for us to shuttle between parallel universes.

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Young readers need freedom of choice

The other day, in a bookshop, I saw a kid browsing eagerly through the comic and fantasy fiction sections, after which he picked a few of the books, when his mother came upto him and replaced them in the rack saying he should read "real books". She tried to draw his attention to the non-fiction section, chose an autobiography and read something off the dust jacket, with the kid all the while gazing at it with as much distaste as if it were a jug of bitter gourd juice. 

This instantly reminded me of the time during my pre-teen years when one of the adult guests at our house read the back-cover blurb of a Robin Cook thriller I had borrowed from the library, and advised me not to read "such books". 

It also brought forward several other such trivial memories to my mind, including the time when my son was six, when he had found an old book of mine on black holes. He became very curious to know what it was all about, had flipped through it and read some of the beautifully illustrated pages. He had left it lying around, open at the page where the authors had tried to imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut trying to enter a black hole. A lady of our acquaintance who had dropped by, noticed that and asked me why I let my child "read these things".

All of it got me thinking - in this day and age, when it has become increasingly difficult for kids to cultivate an interest in reading - if they have somehow managed to wade through the labyrinth of alluring video games, streaming platforms and TV programmes pulling their attention every which way, and have been fortunate enough to acquire a taste for reading, is it not essential for them to have the freedom of choice?

Where is this exacting, marvellous discretion of these people hiding, when they watch daily soaps on TV while having a meal with their kids? The serials with ridiculously twisted, unrealistically melodramatic, unbearably cringeworthy plotlines that run for eternity, where every single dialogue is followed by a superfast camera zoom into the petrified face of every human on the set?! If you ask me, I would say the sight of the enlarged nostrils on the evil face of the Machiavellian serial mother-in-law filling the TV screen, spewing bitterness, is a lot more terrifying than a mere illustration in the glossy page of a black hole book showing the spaghettification of an astronaut entering the event horizon.

They seem to be fine with the kids watching some movies that freely glorify the use of  derogatory language, smoking, drinking and violence - movies that plant dangerous notions into the kids' minds that all this is somehow "cool". But they draw the line at books that offer some harmless entertainment.

If we let the kids be, let them explore genres, let them read whatever offers them enjoyment at that particular phase of their lives, they must surely continue to grow as readers and develop an everlasting bond with books, so that reading becomes an integral and enchanting part of their daily routine.

Thrusting a book into their hands when they couldn't be less interested in it, and forcing them to read it, will scare them away and push them further towards the screens showing young leading ladies being wooed by ancient actors old enough to be their grandfathers. 

Why I turn to the classics

I have found solace in classic literature at every juncture of my life, under every kind of circumstance and every state of mind. These books offer me the opportunity of a friendship with the intelligent, elegant and insightful mind of a talented soul of taste and feeling, long gone, yet magically preserved in its written word.

To me, in general, no experience can be more rewarding than reading, and I have read works of every genre with equal enthusiasm - from Dickens to Dan Brown, from Jane Austen to Jeffrey Archer - and works depicting varied subjects, from poetic charm to political chicanery. 

But after all my reading excursions, I always have to come back to the olden day classics, like a child to a mother after all the outdoor play with friends.

Irrespective of the predominant mood reigning my mind - joy, gloom, listlessness, quirkiness, playfulness, complacency, disappointment - delving into the pages of a classic, brings about an immediate calmness and composure. 

Relishing the cutting wit and satire of Austen, following the stream of consciousness of the characters that fell from the pen of Woolf, digesting the social realism of Wharton, exploring the vivid, candid rural glimpses given by Hardy, understanding the deep  psychological analysis of the creations of Eliot, is like having the soothing, understanding and supportive arm of a friend around the shoulders.

This might be a bit too unnecessarily maudlin to many. But is not the purpose of jotting one's thoughts in a journal to be able to have the complete freedom of being one's true self? Of laying down one's mind in all it's naked eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses without any embellishment?

Therefore, no matter from which quarter the approval or ridicule comes from, it will not stop me from recording on this page, that reading classics, to me, is like gazing out on a sunny, green meadow with yellow buttercups by a serene lake, it's like a peaceful vacation - it's like coming home.

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