One of my earliest memories of reading was a Russian magazine called Misha. An uncle was in the Indian Army and he thought it may interest a little kid back in Vizag, and subscribed to it for me. I don’t much remember much of what I saw in it — I was way too young. But I remember the name, and I think that is when I discovered that printed paper smells delicious! Growing up, there were an abundance of magazines at home. Readers Digest I remember all through my childhood. Actually the only reason my father stopped subscribing to it was because they went overboard into that sweepstakes and ‘win one crore’ kind of mailers, and it was quite off-putting. My mother was a career banker, and her relaxation were Filmfare, Stardust, Woman’s Era, Femina, and Telugu magazines like Swati, Vipula, Chatura….. For us kids, subscriptions to Tinkle and Chandamama were standard all through our childhood. It is fair to say that our living room was like a dentist’s waiting room — with various publications from different months strewn across the center table and stuffed into every available storage space. We grew up in an era when all summer holidays would be spent at grandmother’s place at Guntur, and mom’s brother had a circulating library near Swamy theatre. He would take us with him to work on his bicycle, and those were dreamy days — filled with smells of old books and long conversations with book lovers.
I went off to college in North India, and a few weeks in, realised that the hostel dorm was empty of reading material. So I found a thela-wala (push-cart-vendor) selling and buying second hand books in a close-by market. Readers Digest issues he would buy at ₹2 and sell at ₹5. I bought atleast one RD every week for all my years there. He would actually hold rare copies for me. Many copies were from before I was born! Every train journey we took with our parents had one standard feature — dad would go to Higginbothams on the platform of whichever station we boarded from, and he would buy Filmfare, Cosmo, Stardust etc for mom to read through the journey. Ofcourse she would gobble them up in the first hour of the journey, but buying those magazines was a certainty. During the weird months after +2, while waiting for competition exams and results, I devoured my mom’s entire Mills and Boon collection, as there was nothing else at home that I hadn’t read. The Hindu, Eenadu (hugely popular Telugu newspaper), their Sunday magazines, National Geographic, everything I could lay hands on. Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer were next, and the only books I didn’t probably finish were Harold Robbins 🙄. Dad would subscribe to Sanathana Saradhi — Bhagavan Satya Sai Baba’s magazine from Puttaparthi, and every page in that would be sniffed and skimmed too. Pamphlets, labels on new products, positive attitude messages in a page-a-day calendars, even the ingredients in shampoos and detergents in the bathroom, everything would be read. Dad was an educationist, and catalogs from publishers, syllabus brochures from the board, sample copies of light reading non-detail and other stuff irrespective of class, nothing was exempt! From Shakespeare to Stardust 😉.
I think the reason for that was because it was available.
The printed word became a standard feature in life. There was never a period when dad or mom didn’t keep bringing new books home. Most of them were magazines and inane stuff, but the habit they helped develop is priceless. When no Filmfare copies were available anymore, I would pick up a book on training teachers from CIEFL and browse through the activities. When Mills and Boon were all done, I would skim through Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda — at an age when I knew nothing of spirituality or sadhana. There were very few channels on TV then, and TV was anyway monopolised by dad after he came back from work. There was no internet. So the only option was to hide a copy of Hardy Boys behind an S. Chand guide to Science or Maths, and act all studious. No book would be left behind! Malgudi Days and Amaravati Kathalu because they came on TV, a fat edition of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings because I chanced upon a copy left behind by a passing-out senior in the hostel, James Hadley Chase in tiny print on cheap paper because they were available on railway platforms, My Experiments with Truth because there were 4 different editions at home and I wanted to see what was different between the 4 (nothing — they were all the same except for the cover and the font 🤐), even cookery books by Madhur Jaffrey and Malathi Chandur because there was absolutely nothing else left to read!!
I was listening to a podcast of Amit Verma in conversation with Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor to the Govt of India. Mr. Subramanian used the word ‘Osmosis’ while talking about being a voracious reader. The term is defined as ‘the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc’. Unconscious assimilation of ideas and knowledge — how awesome is that! That is what we all do when exposed to an abundance of the printed word! Remember the standard advice to all who wanted to appear for UPSC ? “Subscribe to The Hindu”. Remember the days when ‘reading newspaper’ was considered to be the safest (and most honourable) hobby to add into a resume? People who read a lot are the best kind of people — the amount of stuff they’ve unconsciously pushed into their brain makes most of them amazing conversationalists. And it becomes a habit — to pick up whatever printed stuff we find, and browse through it while waiting.
When we learn something good, we try and pass it on to our kids. So naturally, I looked for subscriptions to keep that magical part of our growing up available to the kids also. Tinkle was the only option, and for some years now, Tinkle and Tinkle Digest have been coming home. There’s hardly any other magazine which still offers a physical subscription. Even the super-popular Vipula and Chatura (Telugu magazines) stopped publishing a couple of years ago. In July, I got a call from Tinkle saying they’re stopping the publication and that it’ll only be available in digital version 😢.
Yeah, we have Kindle, the kids have tabs, they now have online classes, we have Byju’s for them to augment their school work….. But we no longer have the physical printed word available.
The direction in which the publishing industry has been heading was obvious for some years now. Any reader would know that for some strange reason, Kindle editions of books are actually more expensive than the printed book; which makes absolutely no sense — except that it makes them more money, ofcourse. But that’s how it is. Most books are not even available in print format anymore, and I can understand the difficulty publishers must be facing to bring out reprints. While many people complain that the reading habit is waning, I don’t think that’s entirely true. We are all consuming a lot of written content — but most of it in short form. Small posts, hundreds of tweets, insta stories…. Long form content and novels are surely not being read like they were earlier. And that makes me sad. But what I’m most upset about is that there is so little availability of the printed word in subscription format. No magazines, nothing new to look forward to every week or month, no new books to smell and casually fling to the side once completed. Reading Tinkle on an iPad is a poor substitute! The whole experience — from the postman calling out the kid’s name to deliver the magazine, to reading it before everyone else at home, finishing the puzzles on the last page, smelling every page before we read it, and then tuck it away in a cupboard filled to the brim with old magazines, to revisit in the summer holidays and exchange with friends — is magic! And that magic can’t be replaced by any amount of graphics and interactive content that gets put out in digital format.
The last vestiges of the printed word are the few remaining libraries which are still being held together by their owners’ grit and hope. They glance longingly at the door on most days, hoping people will partake in the enchantment of their aisles. There are quite a few parents who still make sure their kids spend time with books — in spite of the crazy-hectic schedules we’ve created for them. E-books, audio-books, 15 minute reviews, they’re all there. But nothing comes close to the real magic of the printed word. And that’s a part of our childhood worth preserving and passing along to our next generations.
Once they get hooked onto the printed word, their world becomes more beautiful. People don’t get easily bored if they have the habit of reading. When we say that it is difficult to pull kids away from phones and televisions today, it is only because we haven’t taken them into the Enchanted Forest or to Hogwarts, or to Toyland, or the Hundred Acre Wood. Once we do, they’ll find their way from there into other equally-wonderful lands filled with amazing people, animals, delightful tales, and they’ll never be alone again in their lives. It has become more difficult for us to be able to do that today because of scarcity of new printed material, but it is an endeavour worth undertaking so our kids have their own osmosis and unconsciously assimilate beautiful ideas and thoughts. If we make reading material available to them, they’ll read. Guaranteed. Our future generations will thank us for it.
