Musings
Books to shape perceptions
Books to shape perceptions
I was brought up in a family that was always associated with books. I still remember The Sugarhouse that fascinated me in my primary school. I grew up reading Walt Disney books and collected golden tokens unheard of these days. Goofy the Detective and The Three Little Pigs gave me thrills I can still imagine. There were days when my brother read to me tales form Sukumar Ray's Hojoborolo and Kumropatash, all of which seemed real. I remember buying the English version of the book, Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, when I visited Kolkata in the 1980s. It contained an introduction by Satyajit Ray. I wonder why some schools do not attempt enacting excerpts from it as plays or skits. They could be interesting musicals like Mary Poppins or Little Red Riding Hood.
Added to all this were the numerous Enid Blyton stories I read in school. I looked forward to the prize distribution at the end of the academic year, for it was on those cold December days when I would inevitably get a prize, sometimes more than one prize and they would be books with my name inside the cover, which of course gave me immense satisfaction. This was because though my family had a huge collection of books, it contained very few children's books. To my pleasant surprise, I once found in my father's library a complete set of The Book of Knowledge series. On very hot afternoons I would quietly bring them out and look at the pages, which had pictures of all the world's flags, pleased to find in those books stories illustrated with pictures of The Lion and The Mouse and of Robinson Crusoe.
The library in our home included books ranging from Dante to Darwin and from Rabindranath to Rembrandt. I admired and read some of the writings of Charles Dickens but did not touch the complete library of International Literature, with the glitzy gold writings on the covers. And then there was a series of books on philosophy. My father's collection of volumes relating to the Lok Sabha debates was a set of fat books in green with gold writings of which I understood little.
Next to my mother's sofa lay the Gitanjali in a leaf green cover with the title written in red. My mother always found time to read some pages of it despite all the humdrum in the house. And of course there was a huge collection of Persian, Arabic and Urdu literature on the big black mahogany shelves. Strangely enough, I was sensible enough to take my mother's permission, prior to my marriage, to donate huge chunks of the collection to Anjuman Girls School in Kolkata. I am told the girls there still enjoy reading them.
But what happened to the rest of the books? Well, that is another story. Whether they were sold off for profit by our caretakers or 'eaten up' by bookworms is a question I am yet to find an answer to. All I can say is that the library was beautiful when I was young and I can still picture my father dusting off the cover as he started reading The Rebirth of a Nation by Kamal Ataturk, kept in his study on an open shelf.
Books have been part of our family tradition and maybe because of that some of my siblings have attempted to put their own thoughts on paper. The Position of Women In Islam, written by my late brother Mohammad Ali Syed, has opened the doors to many unanswered questions in the way the book by my late father Syed Badrudduja, Hazrat Mohammad: Tar Shikkha O Obodan, once did for an earlier generation. Another brother also has written many books on Islamic issues that reveal facts unknown to many. My late uncle Syed Shamsuzzoha's interpretation of Surah Fateha speaks of his intellect and his scholarly yearnings.
I do not think I am a voracious reader but once in a while I find myself carried away to a fairyland of dreams through reading books. Poetry and prose for me speak the language of the universality of cultures and human values. I have of late been reading Uzma Aslam Khan's Trespassing, a story of cultural and ethnic conflict that transports you to an ambience of rural life. Binir Shathe Putul Biye by Nazia Jabeen has been fascinating reading, stories I mean to relate to Gudu, Tuni and Puti, my nephew and nieces, one of these days.
As I write, I watch the starlings nibble away at the cherries merrily outside my window. On my desk the two shaliks on the cover of Sourav Mahmud's Banglar Ebong Jibananand-er Shalikera carry me to a pastoral Bangladesh where little children grow up sometimes without the thrill of story books. Have we done anything about it? Children have the right to enjoy books and grow up reading them. Was it not Tagore who once sang: 'Children have their play on the seashore of worlds. . . they seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets'?
To that I say, let us give them the pleasure they deserve.
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