Skip to main content

Listening is not reading

A part of my little library

There was a time when I used to listen to the speeches of Osho Rajneesh on my cassette player. Osho spoke on and on while I cooked my meals in the tiny kitchen of my rented little house in Shillong. It was a pleasure listening to the old man. He could speak about almost anything under the sun and even beyond the sun. He had an exquisite sense of humour too. His speeches were interspersed with witty anecdotes or parables. I still remember some of those stories.

Eventually I lost interest in Osho. Maybe I outgrew my protracted adolescent appetite for outlandish wisdom. The cassette player emanated songs instead of speeches.  For wisdom, I relied on books. Nothing can take the place of books when it comes to intellectual stimulation.

What about audio books? This is the question raised at In[di]spire this week. I never listened to an audio book until I came across this topic. How can I write about it unless I listened to one? So I went to LibriVox which is one of the many sites that provide free audio books. I downloaded one of Mahatma Gandhi’s books and started listening to it. I didn’t go very far with that, however.

Reading is not listening, I realised. I can listen to speeches provided they are entertaining. Speeches are entirely different from books. Public speaking is a different art altogether and I like to listen to good speakers. Listening to someone reading from a book is quite a tedious job, however. When it comes to books, I prefer to do the reading myself. At my own pace. Feeling the very touch of the pages. I don’t even like reading from an electronic device except short pieces.

A book is a living thing which grows on you as you read it. Mark Twain thought that the ingredients of an ideal life are good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience. I prefer my books to be more concrete than the other two.

Comments

  1. I agree. I feel the same with ebooks too... How can I find that one particular paragraph which I loved so much ?
    But there are some exceptions. I have read(!) very few audiobooks, one of which is '84,charing cross road'. This is freely available on youtube. Listening to it was a better experience than reading it !

    ReplyDelete
  2. Totally agree! Yes, listening is not reading.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, a book read is what I too cherish... but then as technology marches ahead we get more alternatives and audio books too are here to stay. For those who do not have the time to read, listening is faster. For those who cannot read for some reason, an audio book comes as a Godsend.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...