Go Read a Book

As I pack a gift for your friend’s birthday I hear you groan, “A book, again?” I hear it, though you think you’re being discreet, trying to spare my feelings. And yes, it’s going to be a book every time.

When you come to me and say. ‘I’m bored,’ I know you have your eye on the iPad. But all I say is, ‘Go read a book’.

When I start a book club I know you come for your friends (and for the cupcakes!) but I go ahead anyway. I invite your friends, I get the cup cakes and I pick out stories – of thrill and adventure, of children like you. And as we craft and play and eat and talk I quietly squeeze in Gaiman and Rowling.

I do it because I once made a promise.

Years ago, when I was a child like you, I had a somewhat drab existence. Until one day I fell in love – deeply irrevocably. This love of mine swept away the dreariness. It opened up a canvas wide and colourful and so very cheerful. It made me new friends – toys that could talk and little pixies, a Polish boy and a German girl, a mighty magician and a young ballerina – I shared their stories – their joys, their sorrows.

I had fallen in love with the written word.

Then one day, wonder of wonders, I found I could create a world of my own, my own colours and my own friends. And that filled me with such great joy. I was a creator, a little like God!

I had learnt to make up my own stories.

That is when I made that promise: that I’d never stop trying to share my love, that I’d help it touch each life it could, I’d help it help each one get wings and I’d help it make many little gods.

That’s a promise I’ll always keep and so I’ll try to get you to read.

I’ll push and I’ll wheedle, I’ll tempt and I’ll tease. And it’s not going to stop till you open a book, till you begin to read.

It’s the  very last day of the # BarAThon Challenge from 1st to 7th August 2016.
The prompt for today is ‘Promise’.
I am with Team #CrimsonRush

 

 

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The teacher

Sangita’s eyes drooped. Who ever said sleep deserts the old, she thought to herself, as she struggled to keep her eyes open. There was a time she could stay awake well past midnight, waiting for her husband to get home from his shift at the steel foundry. But now, come 10 o clock and she was asleep already.

“Nani ma you need to pay ATTENTION!” Pia’s plaintive cry snapped her eyes open. This little granddaughter of hers – what a delight she was and how determined, just like her mom… and like me too. She smiled to herself. Oh the wars she had fought with Pia’s mom! There was the great tattoo fight and the late night curfew battles…..

“Nani ma you are dreaming again.” Ah Pia..

“Come on. Hold the pencil like this and copy that first letter once more. Remember I told you it stands for the sss sound in your name? And that dot on top – that’s for the nnn.”

“Just three letters Nani ma and then you can sign your name,” enthused Pia, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Then you can learn to read. You can read up new stories to tell me.”

Sangita looked indulgently at the eager face staring up at her. She adjusted her glasses. She had been trying but those squiggly letters refused to make sense.
“I am too old for this, darling,’ she said with a sigh.
“But you say one is never too old to learn new things. You don’t know what you’re missing. Come on, take the pencil and try again, please,” begged her granddaughter.

She couldn’t say no to the fervent entreaty in the those honey brown eyes. Struggling to put herself in Pia’s tiny shoes, to feel at least some of her enthusiasm, Sangita wrapped her bent old fingers awkwardly around the pencil and began to write.

It’s Day 5 of the #BarAThon Challenge from 1st to 7th August 2016.
The prompt for today is ‘Tiny Shoes’.

I am with Team #CrimsonRush

That distance between reading and talking

On a reading group on Facebook someone shared this quote here:

If you’re a reader you’ll know it – that feeling of rediscovering a word when you hear it spoken out loud.

The thing with reading is that it remains largely a solitary endeavour. There aren’t enough book clubs or reading societies where you get to speak out about your favourite books or characters. And so you read the words and pronounce them a certain way in your head. You do it over and over again till you use them with the familiarity of old friendship. And then one day you hear them spoken out in a whole different manner and it comes as a bit of a shock – like a new person stepping out of a friend’s body. Some are hiding way so innocuously you don’t even notice them till they slip out of your mouth one day.

Sometimes it comes from beginning to read early – when you’re not conscious of each word you read. I never could get words like ‘Mademoiselle’, the French teacher in Enid Blyton’s St Clares and lacrosse, the game the girls played, quite right.

And sometimes it is pure laziness. I look at a word and know what it is and that’s enough. I’m too intrigued by the story to really bother pronouncing it even in my head. I mean, it doesn’t really matter, does it? For instance in the Harry Potter series I never pronounced McGonagall till I watched the film. Oh and did you know that the ‘t’ in Voldemort is silent? Well Rowling said so herself .  Films on books are quite a blessing. They do help us get it right.

There are scores of other tricky words – words from other languages (chalet) or names of places (Brighton, Houston, Nice). And there are more – Colonel and Lieutenant, Corps, genre, epitome and chutzpah and of course marijuana and mojito. Lord don’t even get me started on the food names – Tortillas, Jalapeños … that whole bunch.

The thing is – it doesn’t really matter till you open your mouth. In any case I prefer a well-read person to a well-spoken one. A combination would of course be just perfect.

So which are the words you’ve picked up from books and pronounced all wrong?