Reading or Writing?

A corner of my personal library

If I had to make a choice between reading and writing, I would choose reading undoubtedly. I am not much of a writer in the first place. Nobody will miss anything even if I stop writing. Secondly, I cannot afford to miss the magical worlds that unfold when I open books. Writers are great people. I mean good writers. One of the present tragedies is that too many bad writers get too much publicity and hence writing has earned a bad name. Another tragedy is that a lot of falsehood is written today and passed off as irrefutable truths.

In spite of all that, if you force a choice on me I’ll go for reading. I have learnt to choose writers who are good for me (and for others as well). I know how to winnow the grain and discard the chaff.

Right now I’m reading two books simultaneously. One is kept in my workplace and the other is at home. The one that I read in my free time while I’m at school is Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy by Christophe Jaffrelot. The other one is by a less known writer on a subject that may not be of much interest to quite many. It is Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, a bilingual writer who writes poems, novels and stories in English and Khasi.

Both the books enchant me in their own ways. Jaffrelot is an eminent scholar. He is the Director of Research at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS in Paris and professor of Indian politics and sociology at King's College, London. This new book of his is “a no-holds-barred account of the disruptive march of democracy and governance in India from the long-established status quo to the totalitarian ethnic style of governance.” [Quoted from the New Indian Express review].

Funeral Nights presents the history of the Khasi people in the form of a fictional narrative. I wouldn’t ever have bought this book had I not lived for fifteen long years (long because they were quite excruciating for the most part) in Shillong in the land of the Khasi people. I knew the author of this book personally too. I remember him as a very gentle soul with a self-effacing smile and subtle sense of humour. But my personal association with him was too brief for my assessment to be objective and my memory to be reliable. I like his book anyway. I learn a lot of things about the Khasi people from this book, things that would have stood me in good stead if I had known them back in my Shillong days.

Knowledge. That’s what I quest after. Mine is a Faustian quest. Reading is what fulfils that quest. That’s why I cannot but read.

PS. This is written for Blogchatter’s Blog Hop: “If you had to choose between reading and writing.”

My previous post in this series: Puzzles, puzzles all the way