Thank you Mr. Bond

Penning your thoughts down erratically and to write a best seller are two poles apart aspects of writing. I was and still am not at all a good reader. Little interest I’ve developed in reading few years back when I read some Satyajeet Ray’s work. It was a short “Detective Novel” and then I read “Anne Frank’s Diary”. Both were different. Former was interesting and a fiction novel whereas the other was just the pages from the diary of a young girl. The later changed my view towards the novels, thou after that I’ve scarcely read something of that category.

Afterwards I read few more. Then I got the collection of short stories of Ruskin Bond, which one of the kids from my family gave me. It was almost for 3 months unread with me, kept safe on my bedside table. One day I was almost to return the book without a single page turned. I don’t know why I placed the book again where it was. Next day I started reading the book. Since it was divided in chapters and the stories were not related to each other, I started reading the chapters arbitrarily. The size of the chapters and the time available were the factors to decide which chapter I should read.

The writer has written about almost everything that happened around him, sometimes openly, sometimes keeping himself disguised, just letting the imagination of reader to find or relate with the characters. He wrote about his friend, friends, love, relatives, trees, plants, journey etc. The writer comes from few generations away from ours, may be 50s and 60s but still we can relate ourselves to his stories. I loved his story about a train journey and the one in which he explains his affection for a girl with basket at Deoli Railway Station.

Then I read “The Funeral”, awesome, it was a story about a 9 year old boy and his emotional or rather unemotional feelings during the funeral ceremony of his father. Today I read a new chapter “The Room of Many Colours” (after so many years I have written colours instead of colors, yes the author has English connections). This chapter explains about the father of the writer and his propinquity with the writer. The boy in the chapter “The Funeral” was the writer himself, I concluded.

We often fail to see the happenings around us. There is story or two or rather many stories running concurrently around us. Most of them are beautiful, emotional and silent. We fail to see them, but the great artists find something to describe and portray. Some write it in their stories, some sketch their emotions, and some outline it as poem. And we mere mean minded people don’t even give a look to it. Have we ever seen into the eyes of an old aged beggar asking for few bucks on the traffic signals, the beauty in the wrinkles of the elderly workers working around your living place, the dreams in the eyes of young rickshaw pullers, the pathetic state of the home of the maid working at your house. Neither, I’ve seen it. Nor we are concerned in the feelings of the people working around us, so mean we are. Let’s give it a try next time.

Ruskin, an Anglo-Indian, has shown lots of love for India, his childhood place Dehra (doon), The Himalayas, The forests, Trees, People of India and many more. I sometimes wonder that how he has been in love with this place, whereas we, so called pure Indians, are always ready to leave India to get settled abroad. How this man had developed love with all the shortcomings with India, whereas we didn’t remember even the good things about our own country. He insisted many times in the book that he is an Indian, thou his parents were from England and Norway. I developed some respect for this writer. Many outsiders had in past and in present portrayed only the dark side of India and won Great awards.

Thank you Mr. Bond, you’ve portrayed India in such a beautiful manner, through your books. And thank you, for invigorating the love for my country inside me.

“Akhil”