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Commentary
aired on KQED public radio station in
When I was growing up in the sixties in India, the television existed merely as a word in our vocabulary. Other than roughhousing with friends after school, reading was the only other major outlet for children growing up in India at the time. My friends and I borrowed books from a musty lending library, a decrepit hole in the wall with tattered tomes, where we paid 25 paise per battered book by our favorite British author, Enid Blyton. If I didn't desperately want to read what I borrowed, dad wouldn't pay up the next time. I dug myself a hole in the bedroom and disappeared into it on my adventures with the Secret Sevens, the Famous Fives and the girls at Malory Towers. We were oblivious to any marketing gimmicks in the UK of Enid Blyton, so we didn't know or care about drinking hot chocolate out of Enid Blyton mugs. Thirty-four years after her death, Enid Blyton, who wrote over 700 books in her lifetime, still promises simple, unadulterated fun for my children. The magic web my favorite books wove inside my head could never ever have been recreated on two dimensions. Books and movies seemed a world apart then. Most books froze in the printed form. Why couldn't J.K.Rowling have chosen to let her work remain a figment of her and her readers' collective imagination? Why can't the act of reading take the child into a world he has imagined the way he wants it to be? Thanks to
the Warner Brothers' commercial wand with pre-packaged bells and whistles,
a new barrage of psychedelic Harry videos, audio books and video games
will flood the market seasonally and, once again, smudge the printed word.
In a world masterminded by film and media, why can't a book be allowed
to remain a book? |