Why I Read

I distinctly remember three of the earliest books that my mother bought for me when I was small. They were The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk and a third book the name of which I don’t remember. But I remember the third book because it had a handle. Yes, a book with a handle. A tiny briefcase appropriate for the small hands that were meant to hold it.

Then followed a hiatus of an appreciable duration, the reasons of which I neither remember nor feel important enough to go into at this point. I was mainly occupied with John Grisham, Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown and a couple of others during these years, with a singular spurt for Rowling in the months preceding the release of Half Blood Prince.

All of a sudden, I find I have turned 16 and my interest has started to lean towards cosmology. I read Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and a bit of Paul Davies during this time.

A chance visit to a roadside bookstall in 2008, with my parents in tow, refuelled the hunger for books within me, and I bought five of them, among them The Agony and the Ecstasy. And, in a visit to a bookshop the following year, I bought Crime and Punishment.

These two books, along with All Quite on the Western Front, an early 70s edition of which I had borrowed from a friend, had a tremendous impact on me, the nature of which deserves and demands another post of its own. But suffice it to say, they completely transformed my beliefs about what was possible to be achieved through writing, what I expected from the books I read after that, and my general perception of the power of the written word.

In the next few years I read a variety of authors from varied genres, and Dostoyevsky receded into my subconscious and unconscious.

And then one fine day, I asked myself the question – “How exactly did the words of Dostoyesvky effect this transformation in me?”.

And lo and behold. I realised I remembered nothing of importance.

I distinctly remembered the name Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – the kind of eventful name only dementia can make you forget; I vaguely remembered the names of the other characters, and I only remembered the plot from an eagle’s view.

What was happening? I remember reading somewhere that the books we read are like the food we eat – we cannot pinpoint which part of the body stored the nutrients we got from a particular meal we had at some point in the past, but the energy of that meal was absorbed by our body, and some part of it lives on in our muscles and bones.

This is a beautiful romanticised way of looking at what we read. The books live on within us through their afterglow, a glow that instils warmth in our mind and soul. Their remnants are vague memories, memories that became the changes they effected. This is the transformative power – the words we read are not mere words, they are forces and their nature changes depending on what they interact with. The unlucky soul who could not experience the love of his parents will look at Harry Potter as, more than anything else, an orphan who searches throughout his life for emotional stability. To someone else who could never go to a good school, Harry Potter may be a source of envy, for he had such good teachers and mentors throughout his seven years at Hogwarts.

Books transform into a reflection of how the reader looks at the world. And since each reader holds a different prism in his hand, a given book could take on innumerable interpretations, in fact as many different ones as the number of people who read it. The only dimension of the human condition that comes so close to such a fragrant diversity of perceivable forms is the world of art, literature included.

I was born in the last decade of the twentieth century. Millennia of human history had already played out before me. Why does this fact not bother me? Why does it not overwhelm me with a feeling of being disjointed from that history?

Why do I feel so at-ease since my childhood days?

In other words, why does an understanding of the sheer magnitude of the quantity of information relating with the history of mankind not unnerve me, and how do I, so effortlessly, take my place in the scheme of things, taking all of that information to be self-evident?

Where did I imbibe all of this?

Each successive generation has access to more information about its past. Before the invention of writing, all of this information was passed on orally, and this is in fact how the myths and legends, prevalent in virtually all cultures around the world, formed. And this is also why we know almost nothing of that period, except through archaeological remains, or in ancient treatises that mention them.

The written word is the storehouse of mankind’s knowledge. It is the sum total of all we know, what we think about the things we know, and what are the next things we could possibly come to know. It stores the past, and shapes our future.

I did not grow up to become a cosmologist, but Stephen Hawking did. And he told me about black holes.

I did not grow up to be a neurologist, but Oliver Sacks did. And he told me about visual agnosia.

I did not grow up to be a philosopher, but Immanuel Kant did. And he told me about the relation between things as they actually are, and things as they appear to us.

Need more?

I did not grow up to be a musician, but John Powell did. And he told me what an arpeggio really is.

I did not grow up to be a mathematician, but Ian Stewart did. And he told me about the Riemann Hypothesis.

I did not grow up to be a poet, but Thomas Campbell did. And he told me about Lord Ullin’s Daughter.

I did not grow to be an X, but Y did. And he told me about Z.

I can fill anything I want into X, and find a corresponding Y. And Y will, then, lead me to a Z.

A new Z each time I read. What else can I want from my life!

And that is why I read.