It was a joyous occasion for the family, friends and innumerable fans of renowned author Ruskin Bond. His 81st birthday was celebrated with great cheer in the hill station on Tuesday. Fans, tourists and local people were part of the celebrations. Bond’s birthday is no less than a festival in Mussoorie. last year, his 80th birthday was celebrated in Mussoorie and the Doon valley with fanfare.
“A Book of Simple living”, “A Gathering of Friends: My Favourite Stories” and a new edition of the five Rusty volumes were released by the author here to mark his birthday. Talking to ‘The Pioneer’, he said that next month, his new book titled “Rusty and the Magic Mountain” would be released. “The magic mountain is fictitious and has nothing to do with the hills of Mussoorie,” he said.
He said he was overwhelmed with the way in which friends and fans had been greeting him since morning. “There have been flowers and cakes. Though I am not too fond of cakes the others here have all been loving them,” he said with his warm and friendly laughter.
luckily for his readers and admirers, Bond has no plans to retire. “As the years pass, I find that I have more and more memories about which I can write,” he said.
“There are people who come and ask me, ‘Mr Bond, are you still writingIJ’ If birds can ever stop singing, only then can writers stop writing. I cannot understand why people ask such questions. Writers never retire. I never run out of ideas for my writing. If I run out of people I write about ghosts!”
Remembering his first birthday (in 1964) after having settled in Mussoorie, Bond says that he hardly knew anyone at that time and there was no celebration.
Born in Kasauli in 1934, Ruskin joined his father at Jamnagar when he was a year old. Ruskin spent many a holiday at the Doon valley residence of his maternal grandfather, William Dudley Clerke, who was one of the early pioneers who helped bring the railways to Dehradun.
The first school which Ruskin attended was the Convent of Jesus and Mary at Hampton Court in Mussoorie where he was placed in the boarding. He was not happy in the school and soon left it to go to Delhi and live with his father, Aubrey Bond, in temporary wartime hutments as his father had joined the RAF. Ruskin lost his father when he was just ten.
He then went to Bishop Cotton School in Shimla. He passed out of school in 1951 and began submitting stories to magazines. Not many Ruskin readers know that the author’s first story was published in ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ in 1951 when he was just 17. It was called “My Calling”, a light humorous piece on one of his masters.
That same year he went from Dehradun to live with relatives who had moved to Jersey and his first major work, The Room on the Roof (1956), was written because he longed for the familiar images and atmosphere of India. It took him two years to save up enough money to return to India. After staying in Dehradun, he also spent some years in Delhi but returned here in 1963 to settle in Mussoorie.
Talking about his long years spent in Mussoorie, he says, “I consider myself very fortunate and blessed by the gods to have had a life without too much distress and disappointment. I have followed my instinct more than intelligence. I am still the impractical dreamer that I was 64 years ago when I decided that writing would be my vocation. I have never written a story or essay unless I have really wanted to write it.
little things make me happy, the sunshine, the birdsong, the bedside book, the potted geranium.” “Books bring me joy. And living up here where the air is sharp and clean and I can look out of my window and see the mountains marching away into the sunset or sunrise. The plants in my room are like my friends.”