All Bond fans can head for The Green Bookshop (Natraj) to meet him
People of the Doon valley will felicitate their favourite and beloved author Ruskin Bond at The Green Bookshop (Natraj) on February 10.The gathering will be organised specially to honour the renowned English author for having been conferred with the prestigious Padma Bhushan on the eve of Republic Day for his contribution to educating the young and to giving nature and the hills and their way of life so much importance in his writings.
Natraj, the Green Bookshop, which has had a very long association with the author wished to give Bond's fans the opportunity to congratulate him in person. The function will be held at the book shop at 5.30 pm.
Before having been honoured with Padma Bhushan, Bond had received the John llewellyn Rhys Prize (for his very first book), the Sahitya Akademi Award and Padma Shri. He is an author who has never sought awards and yet been sought by the honours.
Bond was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1999. In 2012, the Delhi Government honoured him with lifetime Achievement Award. The relationship between the author and this valley goes back to his childhood in the 1940s when he spent quite a lot of time here with his maternal granparents who had a lovely bungalow on Old Survey Road. He has narrated in innumerable works his memories of his days spent in valley as a child and then as a young man, taking up freelance writing as his profession.
For the past five decades, Bond has been living in Mussoorie but his love for the Doon valley has never lost its intensity. And he has mentioned in his work how the valley had a great contribution towards making him the author and the person he is. His love affair with Dehradun has continued all his life and even today, when he see that the town has changed dramatically, he says that he has too many memories of this place to ever stop loving it.
He lived in a room at Astley Hall for quite some time before he moved to Mussoorie. And it was this room which gave him freedom which he loves, the independence that he always cherished. This strong desire for freedom — to live as he wishes, to do what he wishes to, to write when he desires to — is expressed very well in his writing. “I was very much my own person, strong in my likes and dislikes, very stubborn, wanting and getting my own way, my own room, my own privacy; old fashioned enough to believe in loyalty to friends; scorning money for money’s sake, ready to discover things about myself and come to terms about myself…To love and be loved, to be free.” (Scenes from a Writer’s life).
For more than six decades, Bond has been writing tirelessly, dedicating his life to creating a world which has been enchanting generations of readers. His readers span different ages as he has a deep understanding of the human heart and mind combined with a modern sensibility. For each new generation, the works remain as fresh as they were when first written.
His latest work is Tales of Fosterganj which takes the reader into the quaint little hill town called Fosterganj near Mussoorie (actually it is Barlowganj with a fictitious name) where rather strange things happen despite one getting the impression that nothing ever happens there! All Bond fans will surely head for the Green Bookshop to meet him yet again.