DIY Boxes

DIY Nail Paint Bottle Lamp

DIY Bracelet (Magazine cut outs)

DIY Notebook (Craft Tape)

DIY Glass Bottle Lamp

(Made this myself)

Why Simply Reading is Not The Most Important Thing

Being a reader, it’s hard not to come across quotes such as these, and being a critical thinker, it is hard to not be irked by this simplistic view of reading. They seem to promote the idea that readers are superior to others, simply because they read. One quote implicitly implies, that people who take many selfies must be ‘dumb’, and in order to make them ‘smarter’ they should be required to read books, as if all books make you smart and all the selfie taking makes you, or shows that you are dumb.

The other quote goes on to equate reading to learning, laughing and even living. It’s shocking to see how superior an activity, some people consider reading to be, that they see everything else as a way of ‘not-living’, because why else would they say that not reading was equal to not living? This statement is insulting to people who use other mediums of media, such as video games, movies, TV shows, comics, podcasts, etc. in lieu of books, in this age of information and innovation, for both entertainment and learning.

Take my brother for example, who once wrote a beautiful and provocative flash fiction piece of a soldier not being able to shoot the ‘enemy soldier’, but instead helping the ‘enemy’. He’s not a ‘reader’, but doesn’t this show that ‘non-readers’ are capable too? Simply reading by itself isn’t something superior; I have learnt more from Doctor Who, a TV show, than I have from The Old Man and The Sea, by Ernest Hemingway and isn’t that what matters? We should emphasize the fact that we learn not necessarily how we learn.

I am not trying to say that reading is not an amazing phenomena, but that it does not necessarily overpower other ways of 'living'/feeling/learning. And that simply because the medium of a book has been used to convey something, does not necessarily make it better. There are bad books out there and brilliant movies too. Yes the books tend to be better than the movies, but don't forget that in those cases it's the movies being adapted from the books and such adaptations have a lower chance of being better than the originals considering so much of the book is usually left out. The reverse is much more rare: I haven't seen many movies being adapted into books. Therefore there is much less room for comparison. Also different stories tend to demand different mediums, thus bringing in even more subjectivity into the picture. There seems to be no unbiased way to say that books are simply the best medium for anything simply by the virtue of being books. 

First Published at: http://edict.in/wp/?p=999

Image Credits :

http://www.oddman.ca/archives/73846

http://www.pinterest.com/penguinbooksusa/for-the-love-of-books/

What home means to me

Up till now I’ve called nine separate locations my home and am in the process of turning a 10th place into my home. For a large part of my life, I’ve lived with my parents and my brother. Back then home used to be a place where we existed as a team. But unfortunately it’s no longer fully true for any of us because when I moved away, the physical distance eroded parts of our bonds.

I started living in my first boarding school about four years ago, in grade nine. For the first half of that year it felt as if someone had deprived me of my life force and I felt oddly disconnected with my surroundings; everything felt surreal, as if suddenly my life had turned into a bad dream I couldn’t wake out of. However, once I got past this initial phase and slowly started opening up and letting my guard down I built new relationships that tamed my yearning for the place I called home. One of my most memorable moments was when my friends and I were talking for the last time before a three-month long winter vacation and they said they would miss me. My first reaction to that statement was of gleeful surprise because I hadn’t yet realized how close we’d become in a matter of months or that I’d found a second home in an institution I once so uninhibitedly hated. Probably because it wasn’t really the institution I thought of as home but the place and the community I’d so firmly become a part of. In that strange place I’d found a new family.

I guess I could say I’ve got quite a few homes but only a few that I can go back to, the rest have been deserted by me and the people who made those places into homes and therefore no longer exist in my present but will always be cherished in my memories. So home for me seems to be a place that allows a community of people to exist together. But it’s more than that: it is a strong feeling of familiarity and liberating abandon. It’s the feeling you get after a long day when you go back to a familiar place filled with familiar sights and you somehow know that you belong in that strange system of things. Home is having a place to be alone with your feelings and not be questioned about your state of mind. Home is where rituals flourish and soon enough start becoming a part of you. Home is eating oats and watching ‘House’ in the mornings. Home is wearing pyjamas all day long. Home is smiling. Home is crying. Home is laughing. Home is compromising. Home is bittersweet honey that you itch for. Home is comfort. Home is staying up all night reading/creating/talking. Home is memories. Home is music. Home is freedom. Home is love. Home is magic. Home has the potential to be anything and everything and that’s why it always feels different for everyone.