Reading is an act. A process. An act of understanding the black on white. A process of understanding the calligraphy that forms a particular text. Everyone reads; whether it is a book, a piece of newspaper that held steaming pakoras, a magazine in a doctor’s clinic, a pamphlet handed over by an agent, a signboard along the road, an advertisement banner on a wall, the nutritional contents on a food packet, name boards of shops, quotes at the back of cars and trucks, almanacs, horoscopes and so on.
Blind people read with their fingers. There are certain reading groups where a book, journal or magazine is read aloud to groups of people. Words are fascinating. They make up the fabric of so much of our life. No matter which book we read (in whichever language we read), we are bound to come across a word we may have never heard of before or a word that has slipped away from the clutches of human memory. Only then do we turn to the repertoire of words and their meanings- the dictionary.
Talking about human memory, do you remember the time you first came to know about a dictionary? Do you remember the first word you looked up in a dictionary? Yes? No? I remember. It was ‘funny’. How old would I have been at the time when I did not even know what funny meant! Or perhaps I did?
I was reading a book of short stories, covered in a chocolate brown cover, when I came across the word funny. As I did not know the meaning of the word, I asked my father to explain its meaning to me. He did not say anything. He got up, went straight into the room and brought out a huge book with him. It was red, bound.
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