Curl up in bed with a good book.

This morning, Ujwal was desperately looking for old issues of The Reader's Digest. I asked her why. The reason startled me. A Grade 8 student of hers attending an ICSE school had been asked to write a book review. The condition was the book should not be a "classic". Ujwal was trying to help her find a "book digest" that was appropriate to her level and that she could manage to read over the weekend and write a review of. This is unconscionable sadism on the English teacher's part if you ask me. An 8th grader who probably reads only school books, that too under extreme duress as likely as not, and spends her leisure avidly watching the Idiot Box and gossiping about Hritik Roshan and Salman Khan should not be asked to write a book review. To be a book reviewer, you have first to be a book lover and a book reader. When she was here this summer, I listened to Avantika blithely complaining about having to read Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro and the review she had been asked to write in school. When I ribbed her about Ernest being the greatest American writer and a Nobel Prize winner no less, she didn't seem overly impressed. If you must teach a contemporary 8th grader writing skills, please teach her how to write a better SMS, text message and email. If you must make her write reviews, please ask her to review the latest soaps and movies. I could go on and on foaming at my mouth on the subject. Instead, I will direct you to my earlier pearls of wisdom cast here: http://tinyurl.com/4votxp.

P.S.: By the way, for people like me who actually curl up in bed with a good book (my latest is Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates), there is actually such a thing as a book specially printed sideways to make it easily readable in bed. http://www.bedbooks.net/. The only catch is, they have at present in print only "classics", maybe of the lapsed copyright kind.

The black buck stops here.

I am not for capital punishment. In fact, I’m against any sort of punishment. I don’t think it works in changing behaviour. So, I am not a part of the whisper campaign that goes: Do unto Salman as he did into the black buck: shot her legs and slit her throat with a knife. My view has nothing to do with his giving away pedal bikes to street urchins or a Rs 25-lakh Mercedes to a fellow artiste or a lakh of rupees for the medical treatment of the Dalit poet who called Mumbai a whore once upon a time. To retract a bit, I first became aware of his propensity to give away pedal bikes sometime towards the end of the last millennium. On my way back from a business trip to Colombo, I had broken journey in Bangalore to visit Ashu, Nandini, Aditi and Avantika in their Koramangala residence. Salman was then shooting a David Dhawan flick there. Nandini, Aditi and Avantika had gone to watch the shooting. Avantika who used to be quite a smart tot caught Salman’s eye and fancy. Pat came a mock marriage proposal with a pedal bike thrown in as an additional incentive. I remember calling the gesture “cute” and “sweet” like everyone else. All this happened before the poor guy’s sadistic steak made a public showing: manhandling girl friends, mowing down street dwellers, slitting the throat of a member of an endangered species and who knows what else. And, yet his colleagues and fans – who, I’m sure, are all honourable men and women – say that he is a victim of celebrity, a much misunderstood person, a benefactor of humanity. Maybe I’m mistaken but I happen to strongly feel one ought to side with the Bishnois and Maneka Gandhi here.

Thank you for not reading. (With apologies to Dubravka Ugresic.)

Is reading uncool? One Mumbai cabdriver probably thought so without giving the matter much thought, I guess. He lost the opportunity of a lifetime. He had in his hands for a couple of days a diary containing the unlisted telephone numbers of Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan among others. He could have easily hawked them to fans for thousands of rupees. The VIP whose diary – her ‘lifeline’, a mine of normally unobtainable info – happened to be left behind in that unfortunate cabdriver’s cab one Sunday afternoon was lucky. She got a cabdriver who thought reading was uncool and, as a result, she got her precious treasure trove back. HR and SK were spared the trouble and the expense of changing their unlisted telephone numbers. The cabdriver’s son who delivered the prodigal diary did claim a couple of hundred bucks by way of transportation – and reward for honesty, I suppose. But look at it this way. The cabdriver did read her address on the flyleaf. Else, the diary would never have come home. But obviously that was about the only stuff he bothered to read. No curiosity, no reward, what? My son Ashu who was in Mumbai briefly told me both his daughters, Aditi and Avantika, seem to think reading is uncool. That surprised me no end because both of them write well, far better than many of their peers. (P.S.: In my book, if reading is uncool, so is writing. Evidently, they and I don’t read the same stuff, huh? ) Seems kind of logical, though, since they live in the US of A where the National Endowment for the Arts uncovered “a precipitous downward trend in book reading” – despite the much-hyped Oprah Book Club helping to push millions of books. The NEA senses "an imminent cultural crisis" and predicts: "At the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century." Aditi and Avantika head the trendsetters. Let’s hope pretty soon they’re not at a loss for words. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/181442_reading09.html. Review summaries of Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You For Not Reading: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ugresicd/thankyou.htm#summaries. (Irony of irony: Aditi and Avantika’s mom, Nandini, got me a copy of Thank You For Not Reading on her last visit to Mumbai a couple of years back. )

STOP PRESS: To read Alchemy, one of the 33 pieces from Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You for Not Reading: Essays in Literary Trivia, go here: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no13/Alchemy. Quotable quote: “The transmutation of shit into gold is nevertheless no simple thing, for if it were we would all be rich. You need institutions, galleries, media, a market, publicity, interpreters (those who will explain the meaning of the artistic gesture), promoters, art dealers, critics and, of course, consumers. Even when the shit is well packaged there is no guarantee that the transmutation will succeed.”