Reading: A collective blog

Literacy—what does it mean to you? How and when did you become a reader? These are the questions in the minds of VENTers! this week as we celebrate Literacy Day.

Most of us don't remember how we became literate—it was as natural as counting one to three, but for many out there literacy is a privilege, as rare as having a roof over their heads or eating three meals a day. Most of us speak and write two languages—English and Nepalese—and that makes us unique and stand out from the estimated 777 million adults globally who lack the minimum literacy skills. In Nepal alone, Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that only 38 percent of the population six years and older is literate, that's 52% of men compared to 24% of women.

That makes us the priviledged ones.

Because we can read, we have the ability to absorb zillions of knowledge through books and ones floating on cyberspace. And because we can write, we have the ability to express our feelings through blogs, articles, opinions, pictures, films, radio, MP3s, videos, and many multimedia tools invented in the last few years. As VENTers!, we are aware that we are fortunate to be able to share our thoughts and express our feelings to the many who read us.

What you'll read is not only fragments of our memories but impressions on how reading became essential to us—a common thread that binds us all. Feel free to share your story on how you became a reader or a story of someone who inspires you, whether they're your friends, family or someone you met for just a moment. Send them to us at editor@ventzine.com.

Happy Literacy Day and thank you for reading.

Simply Magical by Yuko Maskay

I remember picking up a book when I was as little as two, letting the colors and pictures whirl me into an imaginary land. How it soothed me from my elementary troubles. How I felt safe and and protected. My little world of reading and me, just the two of us, dancing the days and nights away. My mother would call me to go outside and play, but I preferred to be immersed in my little world of fantasy. Those characters literally came to life when I started reading and I would live, breathe and transform with them in my little cocoon.

Books are magical. It's magical how it can take you from one place to another in a split second. 

I inherited my love for reading from my father. He had stacks and stacks of books on everything from How to HTML to Life of a Yogi. Meticulous in nature, my dad would underline words and sentences he didn't understand and look them up in the dictionary. It probably took him double the time to read than it did for me. He taught me the art of perseverance. When my dad lost the ability to read, I read for him. Knowing how much he loved reading, underlining and studying, I was sad for him. It started with him taking way too long to read, sometimes just staring at the newspaper, probably confused and wondering why as he struggled with his dementia.

Books are magical. Never take it for granted that you can read. Read when you can, where you can.

My all-time favorite read is Shakespeare. I can read his plays a million times and still not get bored. This playwright is a genius, weaving words and characters to his liking like a puppet master, never wasting a single word, squeezing every juice of character into ink. If I had a time machine, I'd like to be tossed into his world, be his apprentice and wake, sleep and die through his creation. I would fall in love and then write about it, the more tragic the better. A drama queen looking for her king to sweep the audience away into a frenzy of love hidden, lost and found.

Books are magical. They allow ancient writers to come alive through their master creation, never to die.

I inherited my love of reading spiritual books from my mother. During Swasthani, mom would usher dad, me and our two dogs to the family room. We would sit in a circle around her, all cozy and warm in a cold, winter night, as she read the tales of gods and goddesses. Although I didn't understand a word of it, bathing in their glory was an honor especially when it came from my mom. How I miss those days, when a story brought us together in a bond of love, care and celebration.

Books are magical. It can bring people, families, and communities together, even if just for a moment.

Books are made up of words, words are made up of characters, characters are made up of emotions, emotions are made up of experiences, experiences are made up of life. Years and years of human life, knowledge and thoughts are compressed into books for our reading  pleasure. Like a flashdrive, contained and ready to upload, whenever you need it. Taking you into faraway lands, into space and beyond, to countries you've never heard of, to protagonists that speak to you, become your best friends and stay with you forever.

If I ever lost the ability to read, I would like to think that someone out there would read for me. Like a lullaby to my ears, take me far away from myself. On my death bed, I would like to think that someone would recite one of my favorite soliloquies, "To be or not to be, that is the question..." by Hamlet. Like a coroner prepping the dead for her final hours, a magical farewell to a life well read. 

The Science of Reading by Aayush Niroula

I cannot tell exactly when I started getting into the habit of reading. I do remember reading a lot when I was a little boy, though. I wanted to be a scientist at some point in my childhood, so I used to read all kinds of science/do-it-yourself experiment/encyclopedic kind of books. I also used to read biographies of scientists and other famous people  that my father would occasionally buy upon my request. I remember once reading about Issac Newton’s life—the part about how he had built a sort-of-a working laboratory in a box when was still a kid. I was full of imaginations about what that must have been like. I wanted to build a small laboratory myself—there was a corner in my room, a small one, that I always dreamt about filling with a small lab desk, a little book shelf and all kinds of other assortments.

At the same time I also read lot of comic books. I, and later my brother, would persuade our father to buy an episode of Nagaraj or Doga, calling him at his office and sitting through the evening with great expectations. We also had a subscription for the monthly children's magazine, Muna, and when coming home from school, I could not hide my excitement for a new issue. I was enunciated into the world of stories then. Then came novels. One of the first novels I fell in love with is Bikram Ra Naulo Graha by Ramesh Bikal. It's difficult to describe now—the anticipation and imagination with which I read it—this story about a boy who makes a space ship (I think this also appealed to my want of making things, as a wanna-be scientist) and then flies away to this entirely new planet with brick red skies and vast desert landscapes to finally overthrow its cruel dictator in the end. I was awestruck.

As time passed by, I read more. I think I read everything I could find. I would read Famous Fives and Secret Sevens, Archie comics, Wisdom magazine, stories on the Gulmohar English text book, labels and product information on soaps, noodles, biscuits, my cousin’s small handbook of Scientific botanical names, just about anything and everything. I still do read all of that along with business magazines, literary magazines, IT magazines, auto magazines as well as newspapers, advertisements, The Guide to Israel-999, Culture Shock in the Netherlands, World Bank reports (not all of it) and such. We had and still have so many books lying around, stacked on our floors, in the cupboards, drawers, in the old godrej daraj (steel shelf), the even older wooden daraaj, below tables and beds and in tin boxes and suit cases. After high school, I got past Harry Potter and was starting onto the more serious literature: Ayn Rand, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Kazuo Ishiguro, VS Naipul and the list goes on. The AWON (Active Women of Nepal) library at Pulchowk became my retreat for almost a year before college—an escape into brilliant imagination. I have been hooked into books ever since but that essential habit of reading had come much earlier. It's been a very good friend to me, whether it's just passing time, expanding upon thoughts or getting through the bad bouts of loneliness. 

Imagine two kids, covered in warm, white quilt, winter days, under a slanted, wooden ceiling and the brother is weaving super hero stories, flailing arms in action and torch-lighting 3D effects; the kid sister, is amazed at how the hero is able to cross rivers, and as the plot thickens, she must have at one point thought—she could never get enough of listening to her brother. The first book, the kid-sister being me, I ever listened to came out of my brother’s imagination. 

My memories are so fragmented that I had to have a long, pensive chat with my brother to realize how far I have come from my love for listening to my addiction to reading. With Muna and Wisdom strewn about and odd appearances of Archies and Reader’s Digest, I think our parents never realized how we came to burrow ourselves into these worlds in between pages. Amazingly, our parents never forced us to read a certain kind of books, which helped both my brother and me to develop our own taste in reading. No sleuthing is required to know how I became a reader—I grabbed every opportunity to copy my brother and steal from his book-rack: Tintin series, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie and the likes. 

If I have to mention specific events, four particular incidents have made me the reader that I am today. First, on a cold Makar Sankranti day, our mother bought us The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes and a Tintin series so we found ourselves chewing chaku (popular condiment of the Newars) while gorging through our new treasures. Another incident involves a little bit of an adventure when my brother took me to a nearby book store to show off a Sherlock Holmes complete series he had been eyeing forever. At that moment, staring at the thick, old, torn, musty looking piece of bound mysteries, I knew reading was not just about devouring books, it had its own life sui generis while ‘reading’ weaved its own thick plot around our lives. I found becoming the characters I read (Nancy Drew and Jane Austen heroines) fulfilling; library became my universe. I still remember my brother used to bring me these series called Highlights with fun things to read and puzzles to solve. 

Then one day, my brother and I stumbled upon our father’s old typewriter—this extended version of the visual of words being pressed into papers took reading into a whole other dimension. My brother thinks I have grown my own reading-personality. Maybe that's true. I now read more serious stuffs which somehow include children’s picture books. However, I would still like to believe that I became a reader because my brother let me into his world of imagination and roam around a bit until I found my own footing. 

To Write is to Read by Pranaya SJB Rana

There was never ‘a’ book. There were thousands upon thousands. At boarding school, in grade three, I laid my hands upon my first Hardy Boys mystery, in grade six, there was The Godfather, in grade eight, the Lord of the Rings. Each new book that stunned opened up a new world to me. It amazed me that books could be written this way about that. At first, I didn’t understand. So I copied what I read. In grade five, I created my first ‘book.’ A mystery in the vein of the Hardy Boys, complete with a handdrawn cover, a table of contents, chapters and neat plot involving lots of exotic food and people with American names. It was like trying to write in cursive, ultimately pointless. It got me nowhere and I understood that what I held in my hands was a cheap facsimile of what I was reading but I couldn’t, for the life of me, come up with an original idea. And so, I read some more.

I have been reading for years now and still, a perfect sentence sends chills down my spine, a perfect word gives me goosebumps. When I’m reading a good book, I hope and wish it never ends. I want to go on savouring the words forever, but books always end, maybe with the exception of Finnegan’s Wake, at least physically. The pages stop and there are no words anymore. And I am left with an empty feeling, something like hunger, like thirst. But the story never stops. It goes on and on, leaks beyond the pages of books and into minds and hearts and bodies. Each story is another story, each book another book. And they never end. They are sections of an infinite chain, reaching to the sun and back. Each book you read only leads to that other book, that other end of the neuron.

As I grew, the books grew along with me. There was the Catcher in the Rye, so perfect for my teenage years, full of angst and anger, at no one and nothing in particular and a deep yearning to belong somewhere, to be someone, even if it was just a man in the rye, trying to save children. There was Norwegian Wood, so innocent and so frail, like love and of love. And I was in love so everything made sense. But it also showed me that things are often subtle, often too hard to distinguish and there are masks and personas people have. There was My Name is Red, stories after stories, each chapter a different tale, the narration never faltering, a mystery that made you work for its ending, its answers hidden in the complexities of its stories. Right now, there is Tropic of Cancer, with its meandering, violent burst of prose, its unabashed sexuality, its genius. But there will be another. And another. And they will keep coming. And if you are a writer, or someone who likes to write, you will learn that you are not ‘the’ writer but ‘a’ writer. You belong in a context. There were those who came before you and there will be those who come after. Just because you are from Nepal doesn’t excuse you. You are part of the written word now, as it is a part of you. You follow and are followed. Learn your place and when you read writing that blows you over, beats you to your knees and pummels your brain, learn that it is only natural. 

On Dark Shelves by Sanjana Shrestha

I was in a green house in school, which meant the girls in the green house usually got things last; even books after the Red, Blue and Yellow had their turn. Green house girls mostly went last to the shelf and by then, all the Nancy Drews, Hardy Boys and Famous Fives will be gone and we would be stuck with hardbacks, thick and boring, tucked away in the darkness of the lowest shelves.

Those dark shelves introduced me to Dickens, Lawrence and Austen (mostly in abridged versions), and Lain Singh Bangdel and Govinda Bahadur Malla. It was where I met Elizabeth Bennet, the shocking story of Pallo Ghar ko Jhyal and emotions in Muluk Bahira.  

At home, it was newspapers. My uncle subscribed to Times of India and living in the joint family and being the youngest member in it, I got the newspaper last. So, it was in the evenings after school that I got to read the edition of the day before. I also learned how to fold newspapers like the way they do it in the printing press it came from, crisp and fresh. Before my uncle found the newspaper, which was left on the stairs of the house by the delivery boy, I would sit on the cemented stairs, read the front page headlines, skim through the middle pages and finish it off by reading the international news. Then I would carefully fold them the way it came and hand it to my uncle like a good girl.

I loved, from a distance, my dad’s collection of books from his days in college, which he never let me touch. I also loved from close proximity his Mayapuri (Hindi film magazine) that my dad surprisingly let me read. Between, grade 10 and 11, I probably read all English classics and in university read lots of writers from Africa and India who wrote in English. Then came my obsession with translated literature, mostly Japanese post-war literature. I read my way through most of Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. There was also that time when I would grab any new fiction donated at the AWON (Active Women of Nepal) library.

Right now I read a lot of words online, subtitles of movies, poems, fiction, newspaper, magazines, reports, labels on clothes, the words on boxes that came with things inside, instructions, emails, blogs, tweets, signboards and t-shirts. I read to organize my world inside my head, and I read to organize the world outside of me. I read to find a way in and I read to find a way out.

For the Love of Books by Khushbu Agrawal

While almost everybody who reads has recollection of enjoying comic books as children, I have no such recollection. My father used to go to India frequently for his official visits. In addition to bringing us goodies, he used to come back loaded with books, especially those on general knowledge. Every year, he used to get us the new editions of encyclopedia and the Manorama Year Book. For some reasons, he never got us comic series. While the books he got us were beneficial for our IQs, they were evidently boring, and I did not categorize them to be books then.  

I was not much into reading until the day when a friend of mine got me If Tomorrow Comes, a 1985 crime-fiction novel by Sidney Sheldon. I know it might sound cheesy, but Tracy Whitney, the female protagonist of the story, became my hero and the novel got me so engrossed that I didn’t care about sleeping for two nights, till I was done reading it. This book changed my perception towards reading.

Since I grew up in Birgunj, it was impossible for me to buy books because even today, the place does not have a store where we can find non academic books. The school I studied in had a very small library, with a small collection of books, including the Famous Fives, Secret Sevens, Agatha Christies, among others. So, I started reading everything that came my way, including fiction, literature, non-fiction, autobiographies, romance, thriller, and everything else. I borrowed books from friends, seniors, and sometimes even my teachers. After my father found out about my love for reading, he started getting me little treasures in the form of novels every time he came back from his India trips (he never stopped getting us the Encyclopedia, though). Since he himself was not into reading English books, he used to get me novels that had ‘bestseller’ written on them, since that was his only benchmark of judging a book.  

My reading preferences have changed over the years, but I have grown fonder of books. There is a sense of satisfaction every time I find the book that I have wanted to read, with its crisp pages, lying on the shelf of a book store. There are many books that are my favorites, books that I have loved so much that I wanted them to never finish, books whose stories seemed like they fit perfectly into my life. There are many books that I would not mind reading over and over again, the books whose characters have remained etched in my memory for days even after I finished reading them.

For me, books are a therapy. I enjoy leaving behind all the momentary stress of my everyday life and walk around in another place, in a world created by another person. That world might not be the perfect one, but for some crazy reason, I always want to be a part of it.

Sketches by Dipti Sherchan