Recently, my only job during the prep leaves of my exams is to watch a movie or to read a novel other than studying a little. My encounter with the addiction to reading started with a novel called 'Cirque Du Freak'- a horror story comprising of a protagonist who saves his friend's life by becoming a vampire, which I borrowed from my friend around five years back from now. I was so engrossed in that book that I completed it within three hours. Watching me reading something and that too continuously, my mother got suspicious and bombarded me with questions like from where did I get the book and what was it about. I just brushed off her questions and told her that please let me read and well it was just a nice story and nothing less.
That first meeting with a novel left me wanting for more and more. So I started searching for ebooks on the internet because I wasn't allowed for any pocket money and my parents would deem it fit to buy academics rather than novels. Not only I came across English writers but American and Indian too. I took suggestions from my classmates and even from my older friends. They were already addicted to reading and I was thinking why haven't I done this before? Well, addicted would be the wrong word for reading because it doesn't leaves you with any side-effects or does it? I don't think so.
When it came to Indian writers, I was already reading every book written by Chetan Bhagat. As more of a romantic I am, I loved his every book. I don't know why some people hate him. May be because of the '3 Idiots' contoversy or may be because his books always contain what Indian culture thinks to be a taboo to be read or what modern day writers would think to be essential to set some relation between their characters.
I also came across that his books have been adapted as movies. If his books were lacking it, then the pinch of bollywood tadka in the movies surely overcame its absence in the books. I wouldn't say absence but yeah lack of it would be fine.
The main thing was that I could relate to those books and think like the characters were, because they were of my regionality. And that's where the topic of this blog arises. It's not that I haven't read any foreign writers or I that I am a communalist that's why I am saying this. No, it's not. I have read many and I have appraised many. Their work is commendable and beyond any other imagination too. But my point relates to the fact that sometimes I can't relate to their story or characters which they have plotted down. I feel a hollow space between the book and me which surely makes it foreign to me. That thing is still impossible to comprehend now too and I dont know why.
Their needs to be an existence of a relation between an author and the reader which helps you to relate yourself and get intimidated by the story. But sometimes I feel that it isn't there. It's normal, and I agree to it but then the case with Indian writers is different. I can surely relate and guess what they will be approaching in the future of the story. May be I'm already familiarised with the places or the things they mention and because of that I find the person who has written that to be someone like me but only with more knowledge and wisdom.
Same goes with the movies too. I just saw a movie adaptation of a british novel and I could clearly examine it to be shot in parts rather than with a single flow. I'm not talking about the directing and acting here but the flow of the story. It seems like there's no connectivity present in it and that's what differentiates it from Indian adaptations which I guess due to my 'relation' with the author and related people, are more convincing.
May be people who aren't accustomed to Indian movies must have been at the same place as mine and I do respect that. This thing of differentiating acknowledges us to a world which 'is' different from others. And that's what makes the foreign novels more interesting to me and the Indian novels a little comprehensible beforehand. All I would say is experiences differ from reader to reader and so do authors.
Enjoy reading readers and I hope that I'm not the only one who's been through this phase.