Recently, I read an article on education where it says that of the three Rs, reading is the biggest lever for fixing education inequality because once you learn to read, you can read to learn. The author then goes on to say that children’s leisure reading has a direct correlation with scores in standardised tests.
This took me back many years to when I was a nine-year-old barely managing to read school textbooks and spoke just a smattering of English. At the bus stop, I met this boy who studied in the same school and took the same bus as I did. Back then, I was painfully shy and hence not the one who started the conversation. The boy, who was slightly older than I was, did. Almost the first question he asked me was, “Do you read story books?” I didn’t even know that such things existed. He went on to tell me that reading is great fun and that we had a well stocked library in school, and that the librarian (Mr. Nigudkar), though strict, was himself a book lover and hence made sure the library was well stocked.
So that is how I was introduced to the pleasures of reading. Starting with Enid Blyton, we moved on to Captain W.E. Jones and his Biggles stories and then to Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings stories before we graduated to Arthur Conan Doyle. Our rule was simple — if an author has many books to his credit he must be good. That is how, after a brief foray into R.K. Narayan, we discovered P.G. Wodehouse. Initially, his books made no sense to our detective-fiction sensitised senses. Humour, based on play of words, was a genre we didn’t quite understand. But soon we cottoned on, and before we knew it, we had become diehard fans of Wodehouse and his Lord Emsworth and Jeeves stories.
Little did we know then, that in the process we were actually educating ourselves. The good thing about the reading habit is that once the bug bites you, it doesn’t leave you. And, with each book you read, you inch your way up the comprehension ladder.
Thus it was that moving to the first year in an engineering college, almost as if by design, my reading habit had primed me to read and savour every single essay in the English textbook. And what a collection of seminal essays they were! There was Politics and the English Language by George Orwell and What I believe by E. M. Forster, both still considered as fine pieces of writing. The other authors whose essays were in the collection were Sir James Jeans, Fred Hoyle, Hillarie Belloc, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Somerset Maugham, and George Bernard Shaw. I devoured them all and sought out more, from the well-stocked library we had in college.
On a recent visit to Mumbai, I went back to my school and found the room which had housed the library. All that remains is the small name plate saying “Library” on top of the doorway of the room. The room itself has become a computer lab. Nigudkar will surely be turning in his grave.
srinivasan.bhashyam@gmail.com
