PB, "I'm Borrowing Ur Post Title": Bookshelf 2009

PB blogged about the one book she found memorable & interesting this year, and I’ll have to confess that reading took a back seat the first 5-6 months for me in 2009. There are reasons and the main being I was doing just that day-in and day-out, all my waking hours, the whole of 2008 until I was done with that thesis work. It started off as a much needed rest, a rest from academic work for a couple of days. However, the rest period just prolonged to the point that I developed an aversion to reading and writing because of its overdose during the past year. It surprises me to this day how I managed to live without that habit which was as important as cleaning my teeth first thing in the morning after I woke up for me.

I never touched the newspapers or the any of the magazines subscribed. I stopped visiting lending libraries to borrow books. I stopped glancing through our stacks in the mini library at home. Television came as a welcome change because hostel rooms don’t have them. The one thing I cannot stand is tuning into Bollywood dance numbers early in the morning. May be I belong to the old school of thought who believes that morning should be the most quiet time of one’s day. The morning raga played on the strings of the santoor, sarod or the guitar or just a little bit of that flute music would be such a calming effect instead of the jazzy chiggy-wiggy dance numbers of Hindi cinema.

Nevertheless, I had to make an effort; start somewhere. Therefore, I took a conscious effort to read the comic strips in the newspapers. I dug into my stacks for Tinkles, Disney n Indrajal comics. I start re-reading books which printed stuff in ultra big fonts – those picture books of snow whites and sleeping beauties I discarded long time ago after my kindergarten. Harry Potter came to the rescue. I read all the 7 books again; I was happy that Bloomsbury printed them in big fonts. I was on a course of Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys, Perry Mason & Della Street, Chase, Dan Brown, Secret Garden, Sea Gull, Tarzan, Arabian Nights ...slowly and steadily making my way to bigger, thicker and harder volume.

Next, it was the turn of the Reader’s Digest limited editions. And in one of the volumes, I met a piece of writing titled Eat Cake and it once again became one of my favourite pieces of fiction. I had read Eat Cake a couple of years ago when this RD volume first arrived at home. And I love it because of the baking involved, the recipes of some delicious cakes in the last pages and the general positivity the story creates.

Simply put, the story revolves around a family who suddenly has a father sacked from his job and who wants to go sailing, the sudden appearance of a grandfather who fell down and broke both his wrists, a grandmother who finds it difficult to cope with the presence of her ex-husband who left her to take care of her little 3 year old daughter, a mother who bakes to ease the tension building up within her and inside the house and a teenage daughter who picks up a quarrel with her mother every time for reasons unknown.

Out of the blue, the Mother decides to take up her hobby of baking cakes (and she did make delicious cakes that just melt into your mouth) as a business enterprise - an effort to rescue her family from the incumbent financial crisis: And how each member in her home pitched in. And like most stories they lived happily ever after baking their way into the future.

I have made many of my friends read this piece because it is a mood lifter.