My reading habits

It is again a bandh today. I reached home at 3 am from Thailand. I dont remember a single bandh during which I have stayed home all day. But as I was very tired since the Thai Airways Bangkok-Kolkata-Bangkok connection is in the midnight and the result is you end up with two sleepless nights.

I read all the past day’s newspapers and the books that I got recently. Reading newspapers and books is my habit.
Whenever I return from my travels abroad the first thing that I do is to catch up with the past day’s newspapers which I had missed and if I travel beyond a week then I get my newspapers couriered to my place of stay. I am not yet used to reading e-papers on the Net and I like it the good old-fashioned way of holding one and reading it cover to cover. Every morning I spend about an hour to browse all the newspapers and with the recently launched Bengal Post added to my daily subscription, I subscribe to 18 newspapers and I need them the first thing in the morning.

I inculcated the habit of reading newspapers and books since my school days. The school library was my favourite place where I used to plant myself early in the morning before the school started and visited it during lunch time and after school hours to read up the books, journals and newspapers (picture). Since the library allowed one student to use two books at a time, I often used to exhaust not only my quota but also that of my friends.

Between class 9 and 12 I read much of the Hindi literature and translated works of regional literature in Hindi. By the time I finished class 12 I had read all the novels of Premchand, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Agyay, Yashpal and others. I also read Harvanshrai Bacchan, Mahadevi Verma, Sumitranandan Pant and Chandrakanta Santiti. In recent years whenever I quote from the works of these writers in public functions or in informal addas, many people say to me that I must have read a lot of Hindi books. I know for a fact that till today I haven’t read very much since Class 12. I miss those days of reading books and I miss the newspapers also when they are late. I think I am addicted to newspapers.

ess bee