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Igniting the mind
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To live your life from books, movies and people
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LEAVING AN IMPRINT A book can be a mentor PHOTO: K.K. MUSTAFAH
Everyone is "taught" by a range of sources besides those that come through the classroom. They come as books, movies, travel experiences, events, friends, chance encounters...
Wasn't it a journey on a train in South Africa that made Gandhiji experience the horrors of racism from up close? The constable who threw the "coolie barrister" and his luggage off the compartment barred to coloured people, perhaps, was the first to teach Gandhiji how colonialism and racism hit where it hurts most — at a man's fundamental notion of dignity. It was again in the course of a train journey that he read John Ruskin's Unto This Last, which shaped his political thoughts in a big way. Laura Miller, a senior editor at salon.com, writes about this wonderful capacity of books to transform people: "Reading is acutely intimate, the opening of your mind to the voice and imagination of another human being. Like love, it's a matter of alchemy as much as anything else: the right book at the right time in our lives."
J.R. Ramamurthy, a librarian , has seen this alchemy happening to many. In fact, it was with the belief that you can shape lives by guiding people to the right books that he chose to be a librarian. "By being a librarian, I could be a teacher to all the teachers!"
In his article Benares: Learning to Read, novelist-journalist Pankaj Mishra speaks about libraries and books as great teachers, especially to those who have no access to expensive university education. He was in his 20s when he became a disciple of Edmund Wilson somewhat like the mythical Ekalavya. Those were days when he "read randomly, whatever I could find, and with the furious intensity of a small-town boy to whom books are the sole means of communicating with, and understanding, the larger world." Not that you can always trace learning to a specific book or a movie. For instance, what inspired well-known filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli's conversion from a career in pharmacy to filmmaking was the passionate "spirit of the times" (what German philosophers called "zeitgeist") of the 1960s and 1970s. And off he went from Manipal to Pune in search of a new expression in Kannada cinema.
It was, perhaps, the spirit of the times (coupled with an innate ability to go beyond their times) that mentored some of our greatest writers and artistes. The great Malayalam writer, Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, left school in fifth form to join the freedom movement and was imprisoned. Inspired by the lives of martyrs like Bhagat Singh, Basheer began to write and started a revolutionary journal. He left Kerala because there was an arrest warrant on him and travelled across India and abroad for seven years. During these years he did just anything for a living. He was a loom fitter, fortune-teller, cook... He lived with saints and Sufi mystics in the Himalayas. In the course of his life he was twice admitted to mental asylums and he wrote some of his best stories from there.
Who taught men like Basheer, who never had university degrees, so much more than the best professors in the world can ever hope to learn? Life itself, shall we say?
BAGESHREE. S
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