Books, Books and Books – II

My school had a very-well stocked library, or so it seemed to me as a nine year old. I had opted for Lower Tamil (third language ) and I was the only one in my class to do so. My teacher thought I was actually better at Tamil than the guys who had opted for higher Tamil (second language) and he let me spend the time at the library. That was fun.

I started with children’s books, but soon graduated to short stories and novels. The library had a fair collection of English books and generally one started with famous five & secret seven, and moved on to Perry Mason, Agatha Christie , ‘Sudden’, Alistair MacLean, Nick carter, Arthur Hailey and so on . But barring an odd book from each category, my reading was mostly in Tamil . In Tamil ,we never had any children’s books really. so it was Akilan, kalki, Naa Parthasarathy, Jeyakanthan, Jekachirpiyan, Mu varatharasanar and so on. Then there were the popular women writers like Anuradha Ramanan, Indumathi, Ramani Chandran, Sivasankari, Vaasanthi anuththama, Lakshmi (aka thirupura sundari) . Lakshmi was like mills and boons in Tamil. I admit, I liked reading lakshmi kathai as much as other books. Reading in Tamil was fun, fast and easy. Fortunately for us, our teachers never forced us to read English books nor they forced us to converse in English (as they do nowadays) and in any case I used to score better in English than the “famous five” types. (Penguin’s David Davidar was a classmate of mine and he was a voracious reader; thanks to the high weightage given to grammar, I used to outscore him in exams.)

Moreover lots of books from other Indian languages and some foreign languages were available in Tamil. Many famous Russian novels including War and Peace were available in Tamil. I remember reading “Mother “ by Maxin Gorky when I was in 7th or 8th. I did not learn much about the nuances of the Bolshwik struggle or about communism, but the travails of Pavel Mikhailovich against the Tsar’s regime definitely made some impression.

During that period I read hardly anything other than fiction and biographies. Essentially it was Tamil fiction, but a fiction that covered a whole host of serious contemporary social and political issues of those times.

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html