Selective Amnesia

Tell me what you read…

It’s time for me to re-look at my list of favourite authors. I always maintained P.G. Wodehouse was the best, and I still think so. The reasons are many, but principal among them is the fact that he wrote of the “What will never be” – he created, with Jeeves and Psmith and Uncle Fred and Galahad, a kind of world that is so impossible in real life, a kind of world that is far removed from ours that we perceive it as a no-competition to our own lives. And hence, we are not threatened by it, we accept it for what it is, and not what lies beneath.

Needless to say, he was funny as hell too.

All through my life, I have flirted with a dozen and more authors – Sheldon, Ludlum, Archer, Forsyth, Enid Blyton, Franklin W. Dixon, Agatha Christie, ACD, Erle Gardner, Mario Puzo being the more popular. But I’ve never really come to develop a bond with their books. Perry Masons would come and go, much like an assembly line. I would read books overnight and go back for more the next day. The books helped me pass time away, and never once did I stop to reflect, never once did I get the chance to think of what the book had to say.

But that all changed when I began on another one of my all time favourite authors – Richard Bach.

With Bach, I am an altogether different kind of animal. Try as I can, I am unable to read more than 3 lines without stopping and thinking about the ideas he presents, of the theories he postulates, of the world he portrays. A Bach book, even if only 20 pages long, will take me at least a week to finish reading. I have to take time off to let my wildly spinning brain come back to neutral. Imagination and intellect could not have asked for a better author.

Somewhere along the way, I began to read a good lady called Ayn Rand. Heavy, a tad depressing, and therein lies her power. She is able to take your mind to the lowest possible place, and then, with the power of her ideas and her thoughts, free your soul to find the highest state it can. Truth be told, I resisted Ayn Rand’s books. I didn’t want to read her because everybody said I, of all people, ought to read her. But when I picked up her book of my own accord, and began reading it, WOW

Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, and many more come and go

But a Kalki stayed.

I am now kicking myself, (and it’s a difficult, and dangerous enterprise, is the act of kicking yourself) for not having read Kalki earlier.

Ponniyin Selvan. as I’ve already mentioned, it should replace the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, or at-least, be given equal status. Where do facts end and fiction begin in the masterpiece? Ramnath mentions that one fact in a work of fiction makes all the difference. How absolutely true! If one fact can have such a big impact, imagine a story built around 35 established, recorded facts. History, always my passion, could never have been this great. Or could it have been?

Parthipan Kanavu. Did he live? Did Vikrama Cholan really do all that he is supposed to have done? Where is “Shenbaga” Island? Was Narasimhavarma Pallavan really that magnanimous? Questions. Questions. Questions. And one tiny bit of answer. How will I know more? Where will I find the rest of the pieces of this splendid puzzle?

Sivagamiyin Sabadham. I still haven’t finished reading it, but wow! Again, a tiny bit of fact, that of Paranjothi, and an aura of truth.

My latest muse these days is an author called David Frawley. History, propaganda, research, belief, anthropology and more come together in an attempt to throw light on a puzzle that’s got everybody in a quandary. TO me, he promises to explain my own past, and that of the lives of my ancestors. Where did the Aryans come from? Who are they? What did they do? Why such a huge confusion over one small unit of humanity?

These, then, are the books I read and the authors I hold dear.
With Plum, I revel in the here and the now of the book.
With Bach, I am caught up in the what can be.
With Kalki, I am amazed at the what was.