There is a moment of disappointment that creeps into me like a moth in a garden that has found its way from the paradise of some distant lost world of molten lava from the cleavage of a volcanic valley every once in a while I come across people who don’t read.
Books! They are not just ink and paper to me. They blink! They wink! They stare! With open arms they embrace! They mould! They scold! They do what they are told! They are immortal voices that can still be heard. Those souls that wait to be picked from those dusty shelves as they patiently lie await for someone to open the covers and let those minds that wrote them reincarnate and speak to you. They explain, they debate, they sometimes pontificate and many a times they do change our perspective. Yet some don’t read!
Cuddled in their miserable deceptive fake complacency, some find solace in the refractive presence of the human world when the best that can possibly happen is sitting with a fine book to reconcile with reflections from within. For some, the tangible is more important than the intangibles-I hate to believe. Yet it moves!
The Spanish inquisition, the Aztec civilization, the Spartan nerve, Churchill’s Brit wit, Culcas’ analysis, Greene’s perspective into power and seduction, Krishnamoorthees and Gibran’s perception through naïve poetry, Mozart’s canto, Bach’s rhythm, Shakespeare’s lucid sonnets, Casanovas, Cuckolds and Sluts-Charles Darwin’s theory to passify, ‘hahaha’, Shaw’s Candida, Marx’s utopian Das Kapital, Kamala and Pritish’s duets, Freud’s and Luther’s dream, Hitler’s autobiography, Greek mythology, ‘abnormality in normality and normality in abnormality’, the Apocrypha...-that world one gets to see through books one selects to read-Yet they don’t read.
There is something I must confess. Feel like shouting it into the midnight skies through the miserable mists for someone to hear-“I miss those intellectual discussions through the midnight over the hookah and green tea.” I really do. Unburdened, unbothered and untroubled crystal sleep after those fast flying hours. I do miss. Those thoughtless thoughts, those walks in the wilderness of thoughts, those unrestricted words and barbed wires that were crossed and conditional boxes that tried so hard to shut us in that were shattered. I miss them.
Its almost like today I wake up to a nightmare of ignorance and have to stare right at the face of emptiness. Its surprising and fascinating and ironically strange and hard to digest to find this situation amongst an academic crowd… probably they are all a bunch of paper eating maggots which I had always wished to stray away from. Yet there is a faint ray of hope, once in a while twinkling, smiling and swaying across like a faint mirage... that will do for now. This hope will do… will do for now.
Bottomline: “There is more humility than pride that comes with reading”
Books! They are not just ink and paper to me. They blink! They wink! They stare! With open arms they embrace! They mould! They scold! They do what they are told! They are immortal voices that can still be heard. Those souls that wait to be picked from those dusty shelves as they patiently lie await for someone to open the covers and let those minds that wrote them reincarnate and speak to you. They explain, they debate, they sometimes pontificate and many a times they do change our perspective. Yet some don’t read!
Cuddled in their miserable deceptive fake complacency, some find solace in the refractive presence of the human world when the best that can possibly happen is sitting with a fine book to reconcile with reflections from within. For some, the tangible is more important than the intangibles-I hate to believe. Yet it moves!
The Spanish inquisition, the Aztec civilization, the Spartan nerve, Churchill’s Brit wit, Culcas’ analysis, Greene’s perspective into power and seduction, Krishnamoorthees and Gibran’s perception through naïve poetry, Mozart’s canto, Bach’s rhythm, Shakespeare’s lucid sonnets, Casanovas, Cuckolds and Sluts-Charles Darwin’s theory to passify, ‘hahaha’, Shaw’s Candida, Marx’s utopian Das Kapital, Kamala and Pritish’s duets, Freud’s and Luther’s dream, Hitler’s autobiography, Greek mythology, ‘abnormality in normality and normality in abnormality’, the Apocrypha...-that world one gets to see through books one selects to read-Yet they don’t read.
There is something I must confess. Feel like shouting it into the midnight skies through the miserable mists for someone to hear-“I miss those intellectual discussions through the midnight over the hookah and green tea.” I really do. Unburdened, unbothered and untroubled crystal sleep after those fast flying hours. I do miss. Those thoughtless thoughts, those walks in the wilderness of thoughts, those unrestricted words and barbed wires that were crossed and conditional boxes that tried so hard to shut us in that were shattered. I miss them.
Its almost like today I wake up to a nightmare of ignorance and have to stare right at the face of emptiness. Its surprising and fascinating and ironically strange and hard to digest to find this situation amongst an academic crowd… probably they are all a bunch of paper eating maggots which I had always wished to stray away from. Yet there is a faint ray of hope, once in a while twinkling, smiling and swaying across like a faint mirage... that will do for now. This hope will do… will do for now.
Bottomline: “There is more humility than pride that comes with reading”
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