A rainy day, a sizzling mug of creamy coffee, a snug couch and a favourite book. The scene sounds too good to be true. But not too many years ago, this was the way most people spent many a rainy day.
Television was not an addiction and computers, of course, were not available to the common people. There was no email and no World Wide Web. If one had to lose oneself in another world, different from one’s own, one did not have any social networking sites to open. It could be easily done by immersing oneself in any book one wanted to.
Books transported us into the depths of other lives, other places, other worlds. Whether it was Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or the Dorlcote Mill in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s world-famous Gone with the Wind, or Highbury in Jane Austen’s Emma. Turning the pages and following the characters, we forgot our own mundane existence and became very much a part of the fictional world we entered. All else was wiped off from our minds while we read.
Even comic books were quite engrossing and characters like Archie, Richie Rich, Casper and little Dot appeared quite substantial to us when we were children in a world that had no cartoons on TV and no computer games. The involvement with fictional characters and places was very intense and they often stayed with for quite a long time after we put the book down.
Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, the fascinating characters created by the inimitable PG Wodehouse, were household names and when people visited each other in the evenings, conversations often centered around some book that all present had read or generally, favourite books and authors. Children spoke about the latest Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew books they had read and exchanged their books with each other.
Tintin comics were the prized possessions of any child and difficult to part with. love for the written word and for the characters one read about was very palpable. Reading was one of the regular activities in every home. Bookshelves were lovingly bought and looked after. Avid book lovers even got shelves and cupboards made to order. I remember a carpenter who used to come home and create beautiful bookshelves, working for long hours, within days. It is not easy to find such people now as those who want them are getting fewer by the day.
Shops that lent books to young and old were found in even in the smallest colony. In some places, we had circulating libraries that lent you books and comics at nominal rates. Years ago, they were replaced by shops lending video cassettes and then came in VCD and DVD libraries. But the extremely cosy and homely feeling these little neighbourhood libraries could give us could never be replaced by anything provided by digital technology. They made us feel so rich, even though we knew that we would have to part with the book as soon as we finished reading it.
I clearly remember the mobile library that came every Saturday to the colony where my Nanaji lived. The excitement of going inside the vehicle full of books was a highpoint of our lives.
The books had to be returned the next Saturday. A week was more than enough for us to devour the three books which we could get on Nanaji’s card. I have not seen such a book van for years. We really seem to have lost those joys in the labyrinth of technological advancements.
Books helped us to get in touch with ourselves, gave us peace of mind and ignited our imagination like no film or TV serial can do today. They moulded our thoughts and even greatly influenced our way of looking at the world. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds and Margaret Mitchell’s immortal classic Gone with the Wind are some of the books that have affected me greatly. Read in my college years, I revisit them whenever I find some time. All these books are online now. Many people do read books online. It is good to know that reading has not yet gone completely out of fashion. But online reading can never be as joyous an experience as being in physical touch with the pages of a book, be they dog-eared or with notes written in the margins in the hand of a loved parent or friend.
