Reading is an analog fine-tuner

O my luve is like a red, red rose
And earthquakes can be read
Because technology leads to hand-held devices where it is all
Sweetly played in tune…

…and this is what life is for non-readers. Robert Burns, seismologists, and tech gurus (and many more) create indecipherable concoctions when reading has not been fine-tuned. It is true that if life were a radio station then we’re all permanently connected to it. But then, like any channel on the radio, we are listening to a lot of static and over-lapping of stations which sometimes end up being nothing but gibberish leaving us struggling with even simple words of a simple composition.

So the first rule to understanding life is to fine-tune your own radio-station by reading more. Choosing between fiction and non-fiction comes much later. And anyway, our newspapers and TV debates have a lot of both.

I remember years back as I stood in the library of the Indian Military Academy I held two books in my hands. One was ‘War as I knew it’ by Patton and the other was a slim book by Ernest Hemingway that was titled ‘The old man and the sea’. ‘Which of these must I get issued to read in my cabin?’ I thought aloud.

I hadn’t noticed but my Battalion Commander was standing right behind me and smiling. I looked at him and he simply said, ‘Both’, and walked away. So which of these two books did I choose that day? None. This is because I allowed the static in my mind to raise its decibels and drown me in my own perceptual indecision. I simply opted to walk out to the reading room and browse through the day’s newspapers instead.

The above incident happened years back and now once I have read both books in question, I can say that fiction does have the logical sagacity of non-fiction and non-fiction can have the lyrical wisdom that we associate with well-written stories. Had a different format been opted by Hemingway and Patton, both books could easily have changed places.

Lots of writers believe that fiction connects better by disengaging the mind from the present, helps with communication skills, pushes imagination to seek new boundaries, opens up a reader’s mind, or even simulates life to improve relationships. Come on, this is precisely what any work of non-fiction too does. Non-fiction isn’t simply a dull representation of facts and statistics but aims to use all this information to communicate ideas and the birth of ideas. Well, sometimes it is about the evolution of ideals. Fiction too, by the way, records trends and all that happened in the guise of characters in a story. Doesn’t a fictional story lead a reader right into the heart of a character and move with him as he (or she) steps in and out of incidents to tell a wee bit more about the way things were during the period where the story has been set? Well, non-fiction does almost the same thing. A reader quite literally shadows the writer and thus we move with Rishi Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, or Dev Anand and get a ring-side view of Bollywood in their non-fiction accounts. We go along with R K Somany, Pranab Mukherji, Rajdeep Sardesai, Shashi Tharoor, and Subroto Roy to meander through the business and political arenas of an era. I find Jim Corbett, Hussain Haqqani and Saeed Naqvi as engaging as Orhan Pamuk, Mario Puzo, and Mohsin Hamid… and I have deliberately chosen varying genres in both fiction as well as non-fiction to elaborate.

What matters is how well a book has been written. But then sometimes even reading books not so well-written is essential as this helps the mind to understand the subtle and the not-so-subtle differences between good and mundane writing styles.

There are times when I find even feature articles in newspapers full of energy that even full-length books might lack… read the short articles of Vir Sanghvi, Chetan Bhagat, Khushwant Singh, and Cyrus Merchant. There is a long list of other columnists who are equally engaging and informative as well. There are those who have a witty style of expression and then those who rely a lot on factual information… but they are as readable as any story one reads in an anthology. Go ahead and explore the world of blogging and discover the hundreds of bloggers who write with passion and fall in love with their writing style.

The important thing to understand is to spend less time in sifting fiction from non-fiction and to focus more on reading. Reading matters. Reading is an analog fine-tuner, as I have said earlier and helps us explore life between the lines, so to say.

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Fiction vs non-fiction. Reading scores over all else

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Arvind Passey
22 May 2017