On my shelf is a small book about 5 inches square. It has a brown paper cover with my name on the paper cover. I can’t remember who covered it–me or my brother. Until a few years ago, its binding was as strong as the day it must have come freshly out of the bookseller’s box. It’s Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of poems.
Continue reading Our little book of poems
Category Archives: Reading
On the solitary and the social scholar
I was at a huge social gathering this weekend where women were dressed in their choicest attire and men were at their blustering best. There was a lot of noise and a lot of good food deftly travelling on huge trays weaving between the crowds miraculously avoiding dunking someone in a bucketful of gravy.
A million children of all ages swished around the great hall and the stairwells and the tent and the garden like schools of fish about to arrange themselves into different colourful formations, engulfing each old shape into a new one as their direction changed, like the groups of fish in Finding Nemo.
But as I turned a corner relatively hidden from the noise and the bustle, a different sight caught my eye. Continue reading On the solitary and the social scholar
How reading has become more social
For the longest time, we were talking about how the internet was making us unsocial. Rather than socializing with our neighbours and “real” friends and family, we were running after people we hadn’t even met, talking to them, chatting and exchanging ideas neglecting our real social lives (if we had any).
Or if we had a roaring online life it was automatically assumed that we chose internet social as a kind of consolation prize to real social. People were afraid that spending a lot of time online would lead to depression and unsocial, even antisocial behaviour.
Stereotypes of nerds have abounded in our social imagination a long time, of course. Think of Chaucer’s clerk in the Canterbury Tales with his threadbare overcoat, not speaking a word more than he could help, bent down with the weight of his twenty leather-bound books, a very rare handmade commodity back then. Continue reading How reading has become more social
Those readers in the train
I’ve been waiting a long time for the PATH train at a station in Jersey City. The train will take me under the Hudson river to mid-town Manhattan. It arrives at last and I get in.
It’s not rush hour exactly though not everyone has got a seat. But it’s not so packed right now that someone will trample over your toes or elbow you out of their way to push themselves into or out of the train.
I notice a curious sight.
A lot of people sitting or standing inside the train are reading. Continue reading Those readers in the train
Email and the Parents
It was probably the year 2001 and I was checking my email in a computer lab in a school in Florida trying to concentrate amidst the loud noise that the dot matrix printers were making on the aisle (which were the only printers completely free for students then although laser ones did exist).
I was checking an email that had the following subject line:
INFORMATION RECEIVED. ACTION TAKEN.
Continue reading Email and the Parents
Why I don’t read literature in the global age
njoy! 4get wastin tym @ lit class LOL!
I was looking to widen my horizons through reading literature recently and look what I found outside the book!
A stretched world that’s already shrunk so small that I don’t know where to look to expand my mind anymore.
I saw people in Washington Square Park yesterday eating South Indian dosas wrapped like a Mexican burrito from a street vendor and I read in the news that they got 3G on top of mount Everest at last.
Continue reading Why I don’t read literature in the global age
bottledworder 