A humming word

There are some days when we want to turn to the familiar and ensconce in that familiar song whose lyrics run on our tongue like butter. One such familiar space is Ruskin Bond (atleast for me!). I don’t want to read about plagues or diseases—nor do I want to escape what’s happening around. But what if you could turn into something familiar such as chewing the edge of your grandmother’s saree or just resting your head on that old cot. It just calms you down from this overload of information of Corona! (Yes, Karthik Aryan, we get it! No more outings and eating comfort food or icecream, outside!) If you could bring the outside, inside, then pick this book—The Road to the Bazaar by Ruskin Bond. There are a few familiar stories such as The Tunnel. Ranji’s Bat, The Great Train Journey, The Long Day but re-reading them makes it an enjoyable read. Bond paints a picture of Dehra with oil paints that it sits eternally in the heart and in the head. Mukesh Starts a Zoo was one of my favour...

Ruskin Bond is an invertebrate diarist, says the blurb of Landour days. Open the faded brown pages and the scent of various flowers, anecdotes about writers, poetry, recipes, will fill your mind and soul. A skilled writer, Ruskin Bond also offers a list of skills a writer must posses. Here are a few: Have any? By the way, I did not know a Sparrow Hawk either. For those of you who love walking, here's a tidbit: Did you know that many herbs were discovered by long walks into the forests and the ailments were cured by the walks itself? The diary is 140-pages and divided into seasons. Monsoon. Autumn. Summer. Winter. The weather in Mussorie (named after a herb) is conducive to art and no wonder, Bond loves living there. Many a writers have houses there and even in the 1850s, Irishmen built mansions,now unattended. The illustrations of plants and flowers that occupy the margins are like hand and glove. Pick this up for a leisure read and for a quick spa to the aching soul...

Location: your room, somewhere in India Time: early morning Shut your eyelids and place your palms over it. What do you listen to? Rumbling of the monkey mind? Pressure cooker whistles. Whirring fan. Vociferous gargling of a neighbor. The running tap. The rustling of the newspaper. Now, stand in your balcony. You might hear a parrot screech or a sparrow chirp; the wind blowing past your eyes; the cacophony of the street. Perhaps, these are the notes from your room. Now, go into the lanes and by lanes of your surroundings and record what you write. These could be the notes from your room. Ruskin Bond, the master storyteller, chose a familiar fabric of his surroundings and stitched 39 beautiful and colorful notes with them.  The 171-page starts with “It’s the simple things in life that keeps us from going crazy.” The things we oft ignore are magnified and you cannot help but observe the small things around you. Like the red ant that lands o...

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder And stories lie in the words of the narrator There's something about Ruskin Bond's stories that make us pick his book again and again. Having read his two books, Delhi Is Not Far, and Railway Stories - a collection of stories around the Indian Railways, I wondered why and how does Ruskin manage to weave the simplest of incidents into a fantastic paragraph that makes the reader seem he is reading a fantasy book. In Delhi Is Not Far, Arun, a struggling writer, befriends the barber, Deep Chand, a leper, Suraj, Pitamber, wrestler and a prostitute, K, and like a colorful mural, he paints a mosaic of stories around them. The Mohalla, a chowkidaar, Arun's patience with Suraj's fist and his deep affection for the prostitute. Arun's life at People-nagar (Pipalnagar) is far from interesting. The dusty roads where people exist comes alive in these 100 odd pages. And in the Indian Railway Stories, Ruskin makes us fall in lov...