My Book Reading !!

Reading habits from the very childhood builds the person a child grows up to be.
Having been a restless child, I have become friend of books very late. Having an additional impatient sibling could have been another reason that book and me did not have a good timing to build relationship.
I remember our Living room to a typical modern Bengali household decorated for exhibition with series of Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. The exhibit also consisted of Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, Chekhov and so many others whom I never related to. I loved the smell of the new books when they came to be a part of our household, I flipped through the pages hunting for some pictures and I nicely put them back according to the number in the series. The only book that attracted my attention was a Sukumar Roy's literary nonsense called HaJaBaRaLa. The hilarious poems and the striking pictorials kept me hooked to the book. Then came Alice in Wonderland as a gift from Dad and Mom. A transition of linguistic literary nonsense masterpieces by Lewis Carroll.
I always had a lot of people surrounding me, never was shy as a child and as I grew up, my knowledge and literature took a turn through elocution and debates. Again the ardent need to
participate and talk and exhibit my view point in a topic never imbibed the necessity of sitting down and reading books never found any growing hunger towards reading.
It was only during the days when I started traveling alone for my higher studies and Grad School that I became more confined to myself. traveling 16 hours during the weekends to and fro college to home left me with no other company than the Wheeler's Paperbacks in the railways stations.
I started reading.....first one at a time during traveling and then between studies during weekdays. My fleeing home during weekends on a regular basis cut me off from the hostel conversations and canny discussions of the girls, hence more books.
Book reading became my favorite pastime and I started reading Paperbacks, novels and then started pulling books that I had grown up with from the living room exhibits. My college days got over and I never felt sad to leave my room mates or my college mates,I became a professional and still broke the ice with lonely as I had my books with me. I broke handsome conversations
and won debates and cracked communication barrier with the help of the acquired knowledge from the books.
I have literally never been alone, never been lonely, never been hurt because my closest companion never left me. I too have learned one thing from this....You'll Never Have to Look for friends as quoted by Jhumpa Lahiri in REFLECTIONS, Notes from an apprenticeship, The New Yorker's !!