I have never till date felt so defenceless over a headache! In fact, I have never given power to my body to enslave me with sickness. I have always been healthy for years. My last bout of sickness was in 2005 when I was bedridden for a week apparently from the exhaustion of travelling to and fro from college. Architecture as academics was exhausting. Instead of expanding my health issues any further here, I would like to write about my recent disinterest in blogging.
On one hand, I have been reading excessively like a mad(wo)man, devouring a couple of hundred pages every day or so, and yet I find myself bereft of words to write here. I have also met some new people, readers who have turned their passion into a business, which is too cool, I think! The more I look at people who have developed this transgression from reading and owning books and then, selling them, the more subconscious I have become about my books at home. My Dad and I share a common giant wall bookshelf with about Ten granite stone shelves of 0.45mX1.20m. When we first had them made in 2001 in this new house, we had no inkling how quickly they would overflow and as was evident during my Architecture school days, that we would require new ones. So we got off on a temporary solution which has now become permanent since 2010 and stacks a bunch of roughly 300 books in a corner of the TV unit, close to the door. I get told that when people visit our house, their first two glimpses are the wall mounted bookshelf and the corner shelf close to the door. I certainly like that. It was Cicero after all who said, “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
However nice it seems to own books and amassing a collection, it is also a little troublesome and tiresome for the family members to adjust to the constant mess of books everywhere. A lot of my friends have started putting up their read books for sale. One of my uncles suggested the same to me. The only problem is I do not own Fiction which seems to be the popular genre of books. My Dad cultivated a taste of reading History and Non-Fiction in me since I was a kid. Growing up on Classics too, I cannot bear the thought of parting from my beloved Dickens, or Anne Gables or even Salman Rushdie, for that matter. Ever since I started working, I have consciously made an effort to buy books that will enhance and enrich me to live an honourable life strife with values and morale in this world riddled with fast paced changes. I have been having regular conversations with some people who have read and ardently advocate Greek Classical Literature. What a world of difference it makes to speak in different tongues about common passions and love for seeking truth, love and beauty in our human life!
It also, of course, worries me a great deal to keep making choices about reading that was understood as whole truth by learned men and women centuries ago and to apply that in current times of distress. Perhaps, it is not the choice to apply wisdom but the multiple repercussions of voicing dissent and unpopular vote and thoughts that seem to upset a section of society vehemently. Our free liberal expressions of thoughts are liable to be curtailed by all means by both, state and individuals, in power. If by channelling a universal adult suffrage meant power transferred into the common hands, it also gave them a tremendous responsibility for a unanimous and equal measure of respect, honour and conduct to be bestowed upon all living beings. Unfortunately, in today's times, the rights to freedom we imagined would last longer, don't anymore. There is a constant tussle and upmanship between forces that claim to be societies of better living ideals. It doesn't matter if we question and recheck our ideals with the changing tide of thoughts that shapes this unjust age we are surviving. For age-old generations who bore physical, mental and emotional torture through war and personal battles for power, this new world is also an indicator of the cycle of events that witnesses violence and brutality to our own kind of flesh and blood. If evolution is supposed to have made us better, why haven't we turned into peaceful, harmonious social creatures?
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