Books and Me

Growing up I was one of those kids who read everything assigned to them and a lot more. Close to our home there was a library walk able distance from our house and Veena and I used to go there once a week and spend an hour there, and bring back few books.

We also subscribed to lot of magazines and lots of memories are associated with them.

Chacha Chaudharay - I remember reading this book too, but do not remember lot of details. I remember how Chacha Chaudhary looks. This was the only book in Hindi I used to read.

Chandamama - I used to love the Vikram and Betal stories.

Gokulam - This was a magazine published in Tamil Nadu. It was monthly magazine and I used to go buy it at a book store. I even to this day remember few of the stories they used to publish. They had a series called 13th window, in this a family moves into the house and a little girl counts total number of windows and she finds that from outside there are 13 windows whereas from inside there are just 12. And the story is about the little girl's quest for the 13th window. Then there was this other series called Undir stories. This was stories about rat, and these rats lived life like humans and each issue had something new about the rats life (sounds lame now, but was very very interesting back then).

MISHA - This is a Russian Magazine, they used to have real thick pages and a distinctive smell. Even tough the book was thin (maybe had 20 pages total) we used to read and re-read till the next issue arrived. I guess they do not publish this anymore. This was during my early childhood days so I barely remember the stories.

Panchathantra Tales - My parents got me this huge collection of panchathantra tales and I read and re-read them all the time. I knew each story word by word and still read it.

Tinkle - We all have read this, this was mainly read when we traveled. We brought this at railway station and read it. Suppandi was my favorite character. When I got to my grandfather's place Veena and I used to act out the whole Suppandi story for him.

Wisdom - This was a book that dad made us read. We were never too excited about reading this, but we still read it. What I remember on each page, at the bottom, a quote was printed. For some reason I used to enjoy reading them and used to make an effort to actually learn that quote (what a dork I used to be).

Readers Digest - This is the only magazine that I still read. As a kid I wouldn't understand most of the jokes, I just read it because Veena read and I wanted to do everything like her. Now I have started to enjoy it, and yeah Veena still subscribes to it.

Now I still read a lot, but mainly novels. I can not get myself to re-read them again. Now I just think re-reading is plain waste of time and lost all the magic a re-reading brings.

No matter now or then books just bring joy to my life