<p>Public transport marked my life as a student. Growing up in a corner of north Mumbai in the 1990s and 2000s, I felt the value of the city’s overcrowded buses and local trains, whenever I left it to visit other towns, which only had buses and auto-rickshaws for public transport. In those toddler Internet days, people read printed materials in trains, buses, stations, depots, and hospitals. They read standing, sitting, crouched between aisles, amid rows of people toing and froing from workplaces. They read newspapers, magazines, poetry, history, religious texts, smut, in English, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, French, and Spanish. They read and swayed as the Mumbai local’s handles on the top of the train coach clinked the bar that held them. They read fat 19th-century novels and solved cryptic crosswords, playing with clues on margins of the paper using a pen or pencil tucked behind one ear. As a college student, books became my BFFs. In them, I saw my own and others’ feelings refracted; lives laid bare.</p>.<p>Over one summer as a student in the late 1990s, I freelanced for a tiny website and a daily paper in the southern end of the city. In this period, finding time only on the bus and train journeys, I completed reading the three novels of Franz Kafka. Local trains at that time had some of Mumbai’s best writers travelling in them, and sometimes, one struck up a conversation with them and later saw them at the once-a-month poetry reading at the British Council or American Centre.</p>.<p>When the new term began, again on the early morning train to college and the early evening one from it (almost like a typical Mumbai office-goer), R K Narayan, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, A K Ramanujam and the Brontes became friends. I began loving reading poetry. I’d lift my eyes to reflect on the mess of Mumbai outside as the moisture-wrought windows of the train peeled paint and left its residue on the pages of the book in my hands. I found one sight, the mangrove gutter that one crossed between the stops of Mahim Junction and Bandra, unbearable, and often the train would stop over it for a minute or two. I’d tie a kerchief around my nose like a biker and dive into what I was reading to avoid looking out till the train gathered pace. I’d lift my eyes off a moment, an image, a sentence one of the greats I was reading offered, and knew it spoke immediately to the feelings of the person an inch from my nose, who was staring at my book’s cover.</p>.<p>Later, I studied in Delhi and became a hack there. Like many others, I read in buses, autos, and office-run cabs. J M Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Lawrence Durrell, and Maya Angelou saw me through its heat, cold, dust, and smog. A dried hibiscus leaf from Lodhi Gardens has bookmarked my old Neruda collection for nearly 18 years.</p>.<p>I’m a quarter century older now. This year, more than ever, in all my years as a hungry reader and lover of the Word, I’ve felt only great literature levels to the quintessence of life’s ambiguities and ambivalences. I’m a teacher now, and ride the expensive Namma Metro. In the slings and arrows that life has thrown, the 40-minute ride that takes me underneath and above central and southern Bengaluru, across rivers-turned-gutters, corporate office precincts, university greens, and army lands to my workplace, when much of the world has its nose to the cell phone, I’ve read 10 books in 2025. They’ve all been emotionally wrenching, and in these demanding litterateurs’ words, I see the lives of people I’ve known and loved and whom either I have left or who have left me behind.</p>.<p>“History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now...”, writes Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending that I devoured twice this year, “It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.” Stunned, I lift my head, gazing at the passing homes close to the metro pillar: Reading remains the most stirring stationary movement ever.</p>.<p><em>(The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru)</em></p> <p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
<p>Public transport marked my life as a student. Growing up in a corner of north Mumbai in the 1990s and 2000s, I felt the value of the city’s overcrowded buses and local trains, whenever I left it to visit other towns, which only had buses and auto-rickshaws for public transport. In those toddler Internet days, people read printed materials in trains, buses, stations, depots, and hospitals. They read standing, sitting, crouched between aisles, amid rows of people toing and froing from workplaces. They read newspapers, magazines, poetry, history, religious texts, smut, in English, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, French, and Spanish. They read and swayed as the Mumbai local’s handles on the top of the train coach clinked the bar that held them. They read fat 19th-century novels and solved cryptic crosswords, playing with clues on margins of the paper using a pen or pencil tucked behind one ear. As a college student, books became my BFFs. In them, I saw my own and others’ feelings refracted; lives laid bare.</p>.<p>Over one summer as a student in the late 1990s, I freelanced for a tiny website and a daily paper in the southern end of the city. In this period, finding time only on the bus and train journeys, I completed reading the three novels of Franz Kafka. Local trains at that time had some of Mumbai’s best writers travelling in them, and sometimes, one struck up a conversation with them and later saw them at the once-a-month poetry reading at the British Council or American Centre.</p>.<p>When the new term began, again on the early morning train to college and the early evening one from it (almost like a typical Mumbai office-goer), R K Narayan, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, A K Ramanujam and the Brontes became friends. I began loving reading poetry. I’d lift my eyes to reflect on the mess of Mumbai outside as the moisture-wrought windows of the train peeled paint and left its residue on the pages of the book in my hands. I found one sight, the mangrove gutter that one crossed between the stops of Mahim Junction and Bandra, unbearable, and often the train would stop over it for a minute or two. I’d tie a kerchief around my nose like a biker and dive into what I was reading to avoid looking out till the train gathered pace. I’d lift my eyes off a moment, an image, a sentence one of the greats I was reading offered, and knew it spoke immediately to the feelings of the person an inch from my nose, who was staring at my book’s cover.</p>.<p>Later, I studied in Delhi and became a hack there. Like many others, I read in buses, autos, and office-run cabs. J M Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Lawrence Durrell, and Maya Angelou saw me through its heat, cold, dust, and smog. A dried hibiscus leaf from Lodhi Gardens has bookmarked my old Neruda collection for nearly 18 years.</p>.<p>I’m a quarter century older now. This year, more than ever, in all my years as a hungry reader and lover of the Word, I’ve felt only great literature levels to the quintessence of life’s ambiguities and ambivalences. I’m a teacher now, and ride the expensive Namma Metro. In the slings and arrows that life has thrown, the 40-minute ride that takes me underneath and above central and southern Bengaluru, across rivers-turned-gutters, corporate office precincts, university greens, and army lands to my workplace, when much of the world has its nose to the cell phone, I’ve read 10 books in 2025. They’ve all been emotionally wrenching, and in these demanding litterateurs’ words, I see the lives of people I’ve known and loved and whom either I have left or who have left me behind.</p>.<p>“History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now...”, writes Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending that I devoured twice this year, “It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.” Stunned, I lift my head, gazing at the passing homes close to the metro pillar: Reading remains the most stirring stationary movement ever.</p>.<p><em>(The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru)</em></p> <p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
