Dusty Pages

I get this inexplicable delight whenever I spot a best seller or a famous book, at the pavement book hawker’s.

Call it a vestige of middle class upbringing, but the day is made if I manage to steal a deal after hours of harangue, fully acknowledging in a remote corner of my mind, the unprinted pages, the typographic errors and other minor flaws that lurk within those glossy covers.
This sort of mutated into a mild addiction, a couple of years back, and I began to amass books. Books that were neatly stacked in my cupboard, amidst a hoarde of other miscellany; books that were never read beyond the blurb and the preface.

Books that were lent to friends and relatives, with beaming pride in recollection of the bargaining mastery behind their possession. Books that were dutifully reminded to be returned, with a statutory warning of not revealing the contents, for they were yet to be read by the owner, and would be read someday, sometime.

Not that I am a poor reader. My reading speed is average,and my attention span can hold for alteast a couple of days. The longest book I have read was of 1200 pages. The genre of my reading is decently wide, and I read a range of authors.
Although I have always liked reading, I have never really owned books. I used the library, or liberally borrowed from everyone I knew.

Maybe the lack of pressure to finish a book (now really owning them), or sheer intimidation by the length of printed matter made me put them them away for later.
With this hypothesis in mind, I began to feed on a staple of short stories, various collections borrowed from the library. I read them whenever I could find a moment, once even dropping a book into a bowl of sambar that I was stirring.

Revitalised by this exercise, I began to plod through those books I purchased. But, sadly they got tucked under the pillow, stashed beneath the bed, and a few even found their way to the attic. They had began to symbolize a lapse. They sent me on a guilt trip whenever I chanced a glance.

Then my mother started nagging me about the clutter they were making, and threatned to throw them away along with the old newspapers. The thought of the fruits of my labourious bargain being reduced to meagre change spurred me into action, yet again.
On a fine lazy Sunday, I locked myself up with one of those seemingly innocuous ones. I drew up a chart, with the targetted no of pages, Vs an ambitious time estimate. I set the alarm for the first chapter. And began to read.
The alarm rang. And I woke up. Chin deep in page no 5, chapter 1.

I still wage my war against the dusty pages. Managing to cajole extra time out of my mother, now and then.

My current (will always be current) list of dust collectors:
1. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenence
2. A collection of Shakespere’s tragedies
3. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
4. Some Irving Wallace novel (forgot the name)
5. Bourne Series (Read the Ultimatum, from the library)
6. And countless e books (my battle against e books deserves a seperate post)
What’s yours ? *:)


P.S :
* : A desperate measure to absolve myself of all that guilt.

Economies on Rice.

On a sultry summer evening, with the humdrum humming of the ceiling fan coping up with a low voltage, as the background score:

A live and let live policy seemed to have established itself wordlessly in the household.

Both mother and daughter are deep into their magazines, daughter curled up on a chair with a film review; mother squatting on the floor, lost in a vernacular women’s weekly.

The head of the family, reading the moods of his subjects, cautiously mutes the TV, and is mentally transported to the cricketing stadium, replete with lights, action, dancing girls, crying sportsmen, slaps and claps; but sans the sound effects.

Peace prevails.

Mother suddenly looks up from her tips-for-anything-and-everything magazine and says “You should get this special herbal rice for me, they say it is good for keeping down blood sugar levels.”

Father, his eyes still glued to a swashbuckling Dhoni, replies in all earnestness, “Oh no! If you should start consuming like this, then food prices in USA would hit the sky. Then my niece in Virginia would face the brunt. Bush was right. The Indian middle class sure has a growing appetite.”

Daughter chuckles as mother makes another entry in her growing list of unsettled scores.