For nearly a decade, George Eliot's Mill on the Floss was my favourite book. I read it once a year. My Penguin edition eventually cracked under the strain, but I also had a cloth-bound Macmillan pocket edition, printed in 1922 and owned by many others before me. It was the first gift I received from a boy. Recently I realised I had neglected this holy of holies, maybe because the type had somehow got much smaller.
So I downloaded it on my Kindle. Friends who know my low-tech habits are surprised that I own an electronic reader, but it is precisely country mice like me who need remote access to books. When the e-reader was first marketed, I planned to wait for the technology to reach India, find out where to order, and then boldly mull it over.
But the decision was made for me. My brother bought me the Kindle, set it up, gave me a demo and downloaded my first e-book. That was last December. I wish I could say, like the hero of The Time Machine , that “I flung myself into futurity.” Instead, my first e-book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , sat alone and unread on my Kindle for six months before I downloaded Mill .
I often picked up the device, charged the battery, found exquisite graphics on its face as it “slept”, etchings of Ralph Ellison and Charles Darwin or zoological drawings, and forgot it again.
Last month I finally started e-reading. I read Mill first. I had downloaded it free, from one of the many websites that offer copyright-lapsed literature. I don't know whether that accounted for all the mistakes in the text. The odd symbols scattered in the middle of words cancelled out the comfort of bumping up the type size as much as I liked. And I never learned how to skip around, as I would with the bound book. It was harder to swerve past Tom Tulliver (who still scares me more than a khap panchayat ) and sniffle instead over the meeting between Mr. Tulliver and his sister Gertie.
The windmill book read better on the Kindle. It is the inspirational narrative of young William Kamkwamba from Malawi, who as a boy educated himself with texts from a minuscule rural library. In his village without electricity, he studied alternating and direct current and learned to fix radios. Kamkwamba found the resources, mostly of the spirit, to build a windmill that lit up his family's home. Years later, on stage at a TED conference, he said simply, “I try, and I made it.” I sniffled over that page too, and now I am e-reading in earnest.
My latest downloads are the books of H.G. Wells, starting with The Time Machine . In that distant future the Time Traveller describes, he finds a subspecies of human beings who are unthinking cattle, fed on by another subspecies who toil underground. They have no books, no CD-ROMs, no e-readers. That's why I step more guardedly into futurity.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
