Books are better than Gold for they provide company and comfort

In my sixty years of life, just gone by . I have spent more time with books and students than with my family and friends. Indeed with all my love, concern and respect for my childhood friends, and friends formed and continued, all through my academic journey, I would say that books gave more company and comfort than friends. I can’t blame any one, for they would also say that I have not spent more time with them .

All relational attitudes and company are only short lived, in a journey on Earth ,which is more like a picnic. After the show is over, we say good bye. It is very difficult to define who is a good friend? When will a true friendship flower? What must be the crucial element adjustment process. I was lucky to have good friends right from childhood. At various stages of life, books and friends saved me.Dr.M.Varada Rajan’s novels, almost all his novels I read at the very young age thanks to my village library.Dr.Muva writings were simply premieres for youngsters like us to tread on good path, in the 1960s.

Education, sometimes described as an escape route from the life of coal mines, meaning hard labor opened an express way for me to caress and embrace many books, text books or otherwise. I have not read many books both, old and new. I only envy people like late C.N.Anna durai and a professor in my own university for devouring books like a favorite food .Not books taken from library, but purchased from publishers/ wholesale book stalls.

Though book defies definition, like friendship, Earnest Hauser says that it is “part matter, part spirit; part thing and part thought.” He continues; “It is a vehicle of learning and enlightenment, an open sesame to countless joys and sorrows. At a touch, our books spring open and we slip into a silent world-to visit foreign shores, to discover hidden treasure to soar among the stars.”

A dramatic paradigm shift has taken place in our own university library in the last few years. Thanks to the boss,CEO of our university, whom I have described as a gentle breeze sent from heaven, and also the Lady librarian, who was described by some great scholar in one academic meet “ wherever she goes, she does good things”, we have a great library with books in physical format and e books. There was a time, when I found myself all the time in library…..Now, for the last so many years. I hardly go there, given my pressure of work.

While saluting the books I am reminded of the words of Gilbert Highet.While elaborating on books which gives a natural pleasure to the vast human rave for ages, he says :“Sometimes when I stand in a big library and gaze round me at the millions of books, I feel a sober, earnest delight hard to convey except by a metaphor. These are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of a button on our stereo we will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking mind to mind, heart to heart.”

Before I close let me say that there is one writer by name S.RamaKrishnan, who writes marvelously in Tamil, and I am a fan of that great soul. .Indeed I have imbibed his spirit and style of writing. He fuses his writings with cinema and famous novels .I shall write more about him later.

Shall I salute the books now, for the time being, from “One old English song”, quoted in “pleasure of life”, chapter III, A song of Books edited by Sir John Lubbock in 1887.
“Oh for a book and a shady nook,
Either in door or out
Where I may read all at my ease
Both of the new and old;
For a jolly good book where on to look
Is better than gold.”