I take immense pride in being the laziest person you could ever meet. There is hardly anything in the world that can get my lazy ass out of the kambal. Oh, the soft warm hugs smothering me from head to toe until I fall asleep. How I wish I was panda but God wanted me to suffer existential crisis as a human now and then. Ah! This lazy ass is the only reason I deferred this blog writing from 1st January until the end of the month of the new year. Eh.
I think what I take more pride, is in my love for books and reading. But boy, I feel exposed as I write this. There have not been many books that I read in 2020. I think the better choice of words would be, “I read 12 books in 2020”. So much for “a book a week” resolution. However, the books I read in 2020 were quite different from what I usually tend to read. I think I, as a reader, changed my perspective, in terms of what I read and what I confined my taste too. Surely, 12 books weren’t much for me if I compare to 2019 when I read 33 books in just a year. But what I read in 2020 was complex, thoughtful, a cause of tribulation and yet balming. I started my year with 12 years a Slave.
12 Years a Slave was a book that left me in horridness. The more I read, the more amazed I am at the potential of the human race to inflict pain, not on animals but our self. 12 Years a Slave is surely a liberation story as it ends but what we must not forget is the beast within us that can make each one of us capable of committing grotesque acts without feeling an iota of guilt for we believe what we are doing is right. How do we change a society that has inherited the ideas of pain and violence as acceptable? What is more dangerous — killing a man or believing that killing him is not sinful? It was interesting to know that the news of slavery being abolished reached to the Southern States years later. I wished there was Instagram at the time. The news would have spread like fire. As I was reading this memoir written in 1853 by Solomon Northup, little did I know that one month into the year 2020 and all that is going to happen is more killings and human rights violation? James Baldwin’s 1965 speech “American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro” barely strikes a chord with the white supremacists of 2021.
I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.
~ James Baldwin
I moved to read A horse walks into a bar. I think I don’t have the mental capacity or the maturity one needs to understand the dark humour underlying the tones of the book. I am lying. The book sucked. I can’t even pretend to be understanding or naive reader incapable of imbibing the art. Nah! I read one page after another in the hope of something happening, some word making sense, but my suffering had no end unless I decided to end myself. I am confused and still waiting to get some closure on the book. And who is going to give me that closure? Surely, David Grossman won’t. He got an International Booker Prize for it but good lord, that was one boring perplexing read I ever had! I hated it and I never hate a book.
What, however, I am sure of is my all-encompassing love for the greatest of all men — Ray! Oh, mama! *blushes and runs behind a curtain* I read Suresh Jindal’s My Adventures with Satyajit Ray describing what kind of person, director and an artist Manik Da was. Boy, these books need to come with a disclaimer: You may fall in love. Please don’t fall in the trap. I am ready to fall in any trap there is for Ray mister. His kindness, patience, the enigma with which the shots are made are all mesmerizing. The pages of the book were filled with images from his diary and all I could feel was wonderment and joy of being made privy to the thoughts of the man himself. In an age where our generation is drawn towards item songs and cheap objectifying scenes of Bollywood; Ray became an inspiration for a legion of luminous directors who would create art and give meaning to the cinematic world. One such icon inspired by him was Mira Nair and who could defy her charms.
Amidst all the wonderment and humility I was to be haunted again. This time by The Last Mughal. The brutality, the killings, the repugnance, the bloodshed, the cold bodies, cut pregnant women, and more horrendous of scenes I can not come to describe. Is the uprising or what we famously call the First War of Independence truly a patriotic act or was it yet another upper-caste artsy-craftsy way of protecting their religion. I don’t know what is justifiable or not. Whether it was an uprising against the bad or not. Whether it was rightly so a war of independence or not. What I know is — it is the innocents who get killed; women and children who are exploited, murdered and raped. The book was a never-ending saga of violence and cruelty. It was not the Britishers, aka foreigners, who killed us but ourselves. 2014 has seen the onset of patriotism being waved and worn on the sleeves but sadly, to the disappointment of all the jingoists our very first attempt of liberation was not for the liberation of “Bharat”. It was a liberation for a woman from her abusive husband. It was freedom from the clasp of Zamindars. It was an escape from the unbreakable wheel of poverty. And yet, no one taught this in our textbooks. The sepoy mutiny was bloodshed not for the Indians but by the Indians vented against the Indians. What followed the mutiny is a carnage, even more, brutal on the hands of the Britishers. I don’t know anything. Or maybe I don’t want to know anything. But you should read The Last Mughal to know what you have never been told you should know.
If and when you are done reading these books, do get your hands on Bond. Hehe, not James Bond (well, if you get your hands on him I’d suggest to not let go) but Ruskin Bond. Ruskin is what you call — a simp, a cutie, and a pie you should be ready to have any day any time. He will make you melt like butter on an aloo paratha and not the salted Amul butter but the desi white butter churned from fresh milk. The way he writes makes me want to abandon the world and move to hills with a life that is kissed good morning every day by the sun, the wind caressing my hair in a swoosh. Even when he writes on politics and war it is as if he is gardening roses and the moment the Taliban reads his words they will give up their arms. He writes not for himself but to teleport you to the kindest nicest and the most peaceful world there could ever be. And you my friend, will want him to grab your hand softly in his and take you to his lush gardens and Oxford Bookstore on Sunday.
Side note: no one is going to read this blog but if you are reading this and you ever go to Landour please please visit Oxford Bookstore and get me a signed book of Ruskin from there. You can mail me at nikitagarg018@gmail.com
Lastly, another devouring 2020 read was Jhumpa Lahiri’s An Interpreter of Maladies. There are sometimes things in the world that you read, see or listen to, and the feelings they evoke are beyond expression. These thoughts and emotions are inexplicable and all that is left is you and your hollowness filled with thousands of bubbles rippling within. No critic, in my opinion, can ever define the obscurity of emotions with which Lahiri writes.
I may not have read many books in 2020 but I surely did read a lot of short stories, poems, articles and other independent literary pieces. It does not matter if you read 100 books or 5 books, what matters is if you grew. If your horizon expanded. A reader can still be a reader if she has not read the bestsellers as long as she is reading whatever comes her way. As long as she is shedding off her prejudices one day at a time, learning new things and discovering new emotions.
