Shelfie Love!

Books light up one’s world. The shaft of light that books cast make even the darkest or dullest moments a fountain of glittering joy sprinklers. The way that books percolate through the layers of the skin, the cells to touch the intangible energy that exists within all of us creates an ‘Invisible Shelfie Forever’ for the books we love!

Like Humpty Dumpty who couldn’t sit straight owing to his egghead structure, babies shriek with delight relating to its clumsiness. Babies turn into little boys and little girls understanding that in the world there exists a Jack and a Jill. The concept of finding one’s way back home through a trail of Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs starts shaping a new reality of escaping the bad guys begins to shape up. The little boys and girls become the dreamy eyed bug bitten kids following conventional ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘married and lived happily ever after’ with Hans Andersen Christian and the Grimm brothers. They start existing now with a deep-rooted conditioning that begins with an incomplete existence of being half instead of whole, conditioned to accept unhappiness in solitude and happiness in togetherness. We unconsciously get derailed at times, becoming a society who fosters conditioning instead of creation. But gradually like there comes the prince who rescues the princess, today’s books have taken a turn showing us the other side of villains too through movies like Maleficent, Shrek trilogy, ugliness, labelled by the society as a ‘bad’ or ‘looked down’ upon factor. They help children and individuals step away from the judgements of beauty, goodness and the containers of such values.

With the recent advent of animated films and the colours splashed in their language, books have begun to take a visual turn. This can be taken as a rise or a blow to the imagination but either way, it has helped in opening new fortunes for book lovers creating newer easels to paint with.

As we make the journey from kids to teenagers to young adults and finally into adulthood, we are met with conditioning and deconditioning simultaneously with authors and their created worlds; these help us in turn to create our own. Thoughts reaching the pen give magic to the paper and thus books and writers are born like mommies and babies. Be it Panchtantra of the Indian origin or Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter with their lessons for children to learn between good and evil, compassion and brutality each one as a human speaks about a similar value system with humanity at heart. Be it Salman Rushdie, Sidney Sheldon, Vikram Seth, Judith Krantz or John Grisham, each one holds the context of justice for the ‘inner self’ at heart through their diverse styles of writing or genres.

We rise and float down the ages with time, with the curled up feeling on a rocking chair, a coffee and a warm rug in winter. Our hands and laps help us traverse through far and distant lands, seasons, times losing and finding ourselves through the hum of magic, called a book.