Just My Musings

..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 '...

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 beautifull...

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.  Relis...