Monday 22 February 2016

There's more in reading - it has a lot!

The love for art and literature is not something new. Looking back, rather long back, I find the most enchanting tales having been articulated in the most inspiring manner – yes, I am talking about Indian mythology. The character building, narrative styles, dialogue exchange and the imaginative tour they take you on – well they are the love of every reader!


While everything here begins with Once Upon A Time.. and not too much to our surprise ends with Happily Ever After, the grandma tales enabled visually with our Disney Experience made our childhood not any less magical. They spurred not only magic but several fantasies with the magical weapons, the Arabian castles, the fairly lands journey; how could I forget – the rat and mice that became family to most of us – that’s the power of tales!

Time has moved forward- things have evolved; almost everything changed I must say, except this one – the power of tales. 

As passionate as a car racer, a computer game freak, a scuba diver, a football player or a reader – being any of the above is truly a wonder! And you would realize this, just as soon as you became any of these; life feels light - as if you carry no baggage and that’s wonderful! Shifting back gears, let me tell you what’s my favourite of all these – being a reader and a writer.

There are somethings I live by – if you do not read you live just one life, but if you read – you live thousands of lives! Isn’t the choice easy! I am a mad traveller – it gives me goose bumps each time I see airfare sale and I choose to believe that world is my home. Well travelling is nothing but newness. And so is a book – it brings a new vision, a new live, new feelings, new characters, new situations which are not really your own, but surely they become yours as soon as you find yourself falling in love with the scent of old paper books. It’s addictive!

My love for more newness didn’t end with traveling or reading; it made me go ahead create a world of my own – A world in the middle of seventeen hills, where I lived with Nanu and Gauri for several years. Nanu and Gauri who were siblings, they worked at the tea gardens of Conoor, Tamil Nanu since the day Father left them. Nanu was scared of monkeys and he would hide behind like a scared sheep. They looked at the ‘conestillations’ and went to the Tara Mandal.

I stayed there. I walked with them, ate with them, slept on the old cot with them, heard water falling down the old white tap – dip dip; oh! That sound still jingles loud in my ears pulling me back into the green cover of tea gardens all around.  Life was different in the seventeenth hill – ‘Just like Ma was Ma, Nanu was Nanu, Gauri was Gauri so not going to school was not going to school’

Nanu’s pointy shoes, his blue box filled with marbles – I never knew life could have this face as well until I met Nanu. 

I had felt, seventeenth hill would just have a handful of life – but when I lived there, I realized that it had much more that what I had thought. It had answers to all my questions of life – the quizzical life that I had been fighting with, ended gracefully.

Nights and days passed by – my life became matured, evolved and philosophical in the seventeen hills, until I walked out of the place with a last tear justifying my true sense of patience and imagination.

That is when A Handful of Seventeenth Hill Happened – I lived in a world of my own, the world I created.

I embraced newness.

Nevertheless, no waiting for the flight low fare sale!

Write – if you love to write! It sheds off your emotional filth, making you a wonderful person, it makes you philosophical. It makes you share your feelings with the world, probably help you change a few lives – well even if you change one life for the better with you writing, you are doing great! Write if you observe the tiny things as ants moving in a row, or trajectory of a drop of water on tulip near your old house, may be the tiny line in the frame of your grandfather’s old glasses – well the literature is calling you! Imagination, observation and persistence – if you have it in you, go ahead and the world is your battlefield.

Website – www.asthasuneja.com

Book – A Handful of Seventeenth Hill


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