{"id":138,"date":"2011-01-23T04:54:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T04:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sibha.online\/wprandom\/2011\/01\/23\/books-books-and-books-ii\/"},"modified":"2011-01-23T04:54:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T04:54:00","slug":"books-books-and-books-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/2011\/01\/23\/books-books-and-books-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Books, Books and Books – II"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is in continuation to the blog on 29 Sep 10. Then, I was counting the days to move to Mhow for good. I thought I would have all the time in the world; but as the saying goes , \u2018Man proposes, God disposes\u2019. After Sep, it is only now I have sat down to write something.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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I started with children\u2019s 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<\/span> &<\/span> secret seven<\/span>, and moved on to Perry Mason<\/span>, Agatha Christie<\/span> , \u2018Sudden<\/span>\u2019, \ufeffAlistair MacLean<\/span>, Nick carter<\/span>, \ufeffArthur Hailey<\/span> and so on . But barring an odd book from each category, my reading was mostly in Tamil . In Tamil ,we never had any children\u2019s books really. so it was Akilan, kalki, Naa Parthasarathy, Jeyakanthan, Jekachirpiyan, Mu varatharasanar<\/span> and so on. Then there were the popular women writers like Anuradha Ramanan, Indumathi, Ramani Chandran, Sivasankari, Vaasanthi anuththama, Lakshmi<\/span> (<\/span>aka thirupura sundari<\/span>) . Lakshmi was like mills and boons in Tamil. I admit, I liked reading lakshmi kathai as much as other books. Reading in <\/span>Tamil was fun, fast<\/span> 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 \u201cfamous five\u201d types. (Penguin\u2019s 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.)<\/div>\n
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Moreover lots of books from other Indian languages and some foreign languages were available in Tamil. Many famous Russian novels including War and Peace<\/span> were available in Tamil. I remember reading \u201cMother \u201c 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 \ufeffPavel Mikhailovich against the Tsar\u2019s regime definitely made some impression. <\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2010\/09\/books-books-and-books.html<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/01\/books-books-and-books-iii.html<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html<\/div>\n
http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is in continuation to the blog on 29 Sep 10. Then, I was counting the days to move to Mhow for good. I thought I would have all the time in the world; but as the saying goes , … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}