I'm not a bookwork...

Says Jaju Samrudhi

I am not a bookworm But instead a dragon! Ha-ha

Last year in the pandemic I was engrossed in reading lots of books. I realised I already read 200+ books before I turned 20 years old. This was because I always kept a record of reviews of books I read! Honest ratings!

Since childhood till date I have had access to an “A” grade library in Pune which gave me a lot of exposure to different authors, stories and genres. It has 2 different sections. One is a children's book section and another is generalised to all types of books and magazines! I could explore, take my time and read a number of stories. I read comics, autobiographies, informative books, fairy tales, detective books, travel stories, series and a lot more. If I remember correctly, my first favourite series was “Fantastic Feluda” (original Bengali book of series translated to Marathi), which made me fall for all detective stories till date. My love for “Harry Potter” started here too.

Today when I look back at my habit of reading due to no smartphones and digital media at that time, I was more focused on reading, exposing myself to something I cannot see but feel, it gave me a way to see the world through many different eyes.

But I feel, children nowadays are not really fond of reading, or get bored easily. Maybe because nothing is moving in the books. It may have many reasons but reading plays a crucial part, it teaches everything like values, fantasies, good behaviour, ideals, what to do and not to do. So children MUST read. That’s when I started gifting books to my little nephews and nieces and encouraged them to read!

I came across a quote by Albert Einstein that said- “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

I agree!

So let’s make a little effort for our children to read. If they can’t, read to them, it will definitely make them richer in knowledge than you expect!