Justbooks folks have started calling me Ruskin Bond fan. I have bought 90% of his books for reading from them. My friend’s joke saying that I am recreating my childhood, in all seriousness, I am catching up with it. While growing up, reading was the last thing for me. We were small-town boys happily playing cricket, gilly danda of stealing mangoes in summer from some orchard. On some occasions when grandparents would visit, they would give me some money. It would go for a samosa or buying comics: Nagraj, Doga, Sabu, Chaca Chaudhry. There was only one comics shop in the city at the railway station.
Why do I like reading Ruskin Bond so much? I kept asking this question to myself again and again: because I could relate my childhood in his stories. Our brain is a crazy beast and, it likes and dislikes via past association.
I can relate to bathing in streams, borewells to stealing sugarcane, carrots from the filed of others. I can relate to walking hours without any purpose, I could relate to the constant confusion of what I need from my life. I could relate to love, pampering via my grandparents.
Reading Ruskin Bond is like Alice going to her wonderland. Everything of the present switched off and in dreamland. Reading Ruskin Bond is detaching from the cobwebs and walking down the priceless memory of the past.