- What difference has reading made to your life?
Literature, history and philosophy nurtured me, made me good at vernacular and English languages and developed a passion for knowledge that has never subsided. My teaching career and writing benefitted immensely from this one habit. I remember some of my students commenting that I never would stumble for a word when I talked in class and could connect a lot of things engagingly; how was this possible? Now I know the answer. Even now, picking up a book is a pleasure and a challenge. I have never felt bored in the world of books. I have a growing library of my own.
- Any book or author that has had a deep impact on you?-
I graduated from Dickens and Mark Twain, to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, later to the great ancient classics. I most love the Russian masters in the novel. St Augustine City of God and Confessions, á Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ had a profound influence on me. C S Lewis follows close. Biographies are my current interest.
- How did you develop the reading habit?
One of my earliest memories is about a book that I never read! It was thrust into my hand, a translation of a book by Pope John 23. When I was barely four years old, my father, an amateur photographer and journalist, took my photo, sitting on a stool and seriously staring into the book which I could not read! The picture was published on the cover of a children’s magazine and later framed and hung on the wall of our drawing room. The image remained with me, and I think it perhaps made me feel that reading books was a big thing! Indeed, reading was the greatest gift that my father gave me, starting with his small library of all kinds of books and journals, religious and secular. In school he insisted that I read books by getting special access to the school library, where I read Dickens, Shakespeare, etc. in abridged versions. In high school I joined the town Municipal library. College was a treat, because my college had the largest library in the state, and I had kindred spirits around me who loved reading.
PROF GIGY JOSEPH
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