ART OF READING

 

      Art of reading

Many of us tend to have pre conceived notions regarding books and unfortunately its not good. Books are perceived as those hellish gatekeepers through which one could surpass the dreading and terrifying abodes of exams. Pardon me for been too cheesy but it’s the perceived reality of many students who are part of our Indian education system especially those who frown from studies.

In this article I will try to make you realize how fun reading can be and what are the ways through which you could make process of reading more interesting and insightful.

Personally, speaking I too had my fair share of reluctance and doubts regarding books. Whenever I used to go to library, I saw heap of books stacked along the shelves of library. I don’t why but initially I refrained myself from reading books just by seeing them in library.

 But peer pressure finally dragged me into this competitive arena that reading has become, just to impress my peers I use to read those fat books of science, history, philosophy and sci fi novels which I didn’t understood at all but at time it became essential for me to read you ask me why? Coz reading was considered as a social status at least in my school and that my friends is the first mistake that you may make while reading. Please don’t read just for the sake of reading or proving yourself cool or intellectual and making people believe that you had forged a treaty of peace with the gatekeeper.

You need to realize that reading does not make you necessarily intellectually superior than other it will make you eventually after reading for quite a while but you shouldn’t necessarily start reading with that intent. I consider reading as a high investing media where it demands a lot of time for its audience to get themselves entertained. Then why should we opt reading for getting yourselves entertained and acquiring knowledge considering the fact that there are many low investing media like movies, videos and music to get entertained and acquire knowledge. To this I can say that it depends upon you and your priorities. If you are a high earning professional and you can’t allocate time for reading then its okay but if you are young and have enough time then it would be appropriate for you to seek this new way of consuming entertainment.

 Anyways coming back to the story after reading few books and getting myself exhausted in this relatively new world of words I took my guards down and decided to approach them as gatekeepers only.

After this incident I developed my interest towards watching movies and series which ironically was adapted from their novel counterparts. I use to watch harry potter. Back in those days I loved that series and my curiosity to get myself immersed into that world eventually lead me to read all of its books that the movie was adapted from. Also, I used to read articles and magazine related to health and fitness for reducing my weight since I used to feel very tired and fatigued even after doing physically futile activities. This quest of seeking fitness led me to read more about biology and evolution paving its way to phycology. It was not a steadfast process rather I read all these books gradually as more and more streak of question started surging within me after dwelling into different avenues of learning and I just simply used it as a compass to make sense of this absurd ambiguity I was subjected after pondering over more and more questions and their answers and that’s how I became a book worm and then ironically  found my weight to be increased  by  3 kilograms which was defeating the very  purpose I started to read  books at first place(  was just kidding about this please don’t take my lame jokes seriously ).

 

Anyways the point here I am trying to make is embark upon this journey towards the sea of words using questions as your ship’s wheel. Read books which intrigue you and tries to satiate your questions and problems of your life rather than reading books which are popular now. You might find yourself traversing through numerous portals opening different dimensions of understanding and you might find yourself learning from places where you couldn’t have even imagined before starting.

 

After reading books for a long time, I found reading to be more tiresome and exhaustive rather than been explorative and fun as though it has lost it’ charm that it used to bestow before.

 

I wanted to make it more interesting but I didn’t knew how again I started to withdrew myself from reading and started watch movies as a past time it seemed like I was always oscillating between movies and their original counterparts. I always used to read fan fiction to have an idea about the sequel just to quench my curiosity to know  more about the movie .more about the movie.  A thought struck my mind while reading those fan fictions we as an audience are always curious to know about the subsequent plot points of the movie and hence, we tend to drape all this ambiguity with our imagination couldn’t I use my imagination to write and predict the course of plot that the author would tend to take to push the narrative of story to a possibly divergent end. Thus, I always used to leave the novel in between and always used to formulate the subsequent possible end of a story or a set of ideas.

After writing (thinking) about those ideas I used to juxtapose it with the actual ending of the latter. It was really an interesting experiment to know the kind of thinking I adopt and above all the kind of narratives I fall into. Building on these you could try to reading books at leave it instinctively only to find yourself creating your own.

 

Once you find yourself reading tons of books you could jump off between different genres of book and can make them coalesce into one, at least one could try to establish a conversation with different stream of thoughts. Its like calling upon their authors on a debate and the thing that would come out of their arguments will be pure gold (by the way this thing is also represented in a metamorphic fashion in samundra manthan story where devas and rakshas were churning out the ocean for abstracting amrita the elixir that makes its consumer an immortal).

In this whole venture of reading we tend to forget the most important aspect of reading that is learning, one could always flex upon the literal concepts that they have memorized from book and can form an impression of been more smarter than others but this mitigates the very purpose of learning which ironically is very contradictory to the things propagated to us by our education system that is to provide us with the mental peace that we all are seeking through security ,excessive earning,  family , relationships etc.. Been smarter can also be one of the ways to achieve peace but by doing that you will unknowingly ascribe yourself in the rat race , the very thing you wanted to unknowingly transcend from by immersing yourself into this new world of ideas and stories.

 Read books not to get yourself into the competition but to open yourself into different perspective and different dimension of thinking and extrapolate several concepts proposed into different avenues of your life to improve yourself and eventually improving others.