Breaking The Reading Block
Published in Deccan Chronicle dated August 3rd, 2008
Whenever a student enrols for speech and drama training, I can anticipate the parent introduce the youngster saying ‘My child just doesn’t read… it is cartoons...cartoons all the time!”
The refrain has become so distressingly constant that it persuaded me to understand my own cultivation of the reading habit to suggest solutions
The Calcutta I grew up in was a paradise for the poet, artist, book-lover and the cineaste but in the ‘70s aged under ten I was none of these and certainly no cineaste.
The famous Metro Cinema held morning shows on Sunday, for which my father took me zealously. Whether it was 101 Dalmations, Cat Ballou, or Hatari - at the sound of the first bark or, gun shot I was under the seat, looking askance at a censored vertical frame from between Dad's legs.
On Thursdays - our weekly school holiday- we were shown films at school. Tom and Jerry always preceded the main attraction, which included Flipper the Dolphin, John Wayne's westerns, Lawrence of Arabia and Sergei Bondarchuk’s 'War and Peace' During the scary bits, ‘under the seat’ was not an option in the company of peers, so eyes were kept shut.
Pa never explained why he persisted in taking me to the movies when I made his life utterly miserable but with those faltering beginnings, my future transformation into a filmmaker confounded us both. To add to his misery I insisted he read the same fire-engine story at bedtime ad nauseum. Every night a new ‘film’ premiered in my imagination, with the variations Pa brought to the story.
It took me four decades to realise that my dad and my school had unknowingly initiated me into visual literacy, expanding the visual vocabulary of my imagination. While reading 101 Great Lives, Enid Blyton, Conan Doyle and Alistair MacLean, my imagination was assisted by the visual imagery of the movies.
I conveyed the movie contagion to my children, exciting them with films about flying like 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines' and "Battle of Britain". Films aroused a curiosity about Montgolfier's balloon and Supermarine Spitfires which hooked them onto reading.
Rounding off the story-telling experience, I had preserved my fire engine storybook that I read to my sons at bed-time. Inspired by Pa, I too adopted circuitous narrative routes to realise that they too were enthralled more by the story-telling than the story.
In retrospect, I had not realised the importance of visual imagery in encouraging reading, till I began teaching speech and drama.
When reading poetry or prose, words remained text on a page; not triggering cinema in the imagination.
If we want our children to read, we have to read stories to them; read with them. Television, cinema and the internet are resources that complement the reading habit, not marginalise it. To view programmes or a film together with our children fortifies them against the subliminal shock and awe of visual bombardment – creating the curiosity to ‘find out more’ through reading.
Every weekend, my children and I travel across continents and centuries from the
In a world abounding in knowledge resources, it is tragic to hear a young mind say “I am bored!” Wouldn’t it be gratifying if we inspired the young mind to curl up in a bean bag at the library, consumed by the cinema paradiso of his imagination, lost in a book?
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