I have crossed the three-quarters of a century.

When I muse over my life apart from my illustrious (I feel so!) professional career overcoming several roadblocks and physical and mental strains they all look like a blend of good and bad dreams and smooth and rough passages I had navigated through.

Yes. In a way I have grown in many aspects and also become weak in some areas. I know they are inevitable. But at no stage have I stopped buying books, visiting libraries or if there is nothing to do, go to a bookshop and browse through books and relish the smell of a new book. (They do have! If you haven’t, please try)

On this journey, I befriended a gentleman who collected the original publications of famous Tamil writers in popular Tamil magazines of the sixties to eighties and kept them bound carefully and protected them. He donated some to me and some to lending libraries also before he left the world.

Now I too follow his path.

Even then, my shelves are full of books. I look at some of the books I never touch now; the dictionaries. Oxford and Chambers. They still occupy my shelf silently; so also, the Atlas. As I have started using the PC for all my writing, I don’t have to refer to lexicons since I can quickly get it through the PC. As I slowly started using the PC for typing, I almost became alien to handwriting in Tamil, English, or Hindi.

The pens that I have collected (please believe me, despite these, I visited the Pen Exhibition last year and bought one!) through the years stare at me with anger from a beautiful porcelain holder.

With a certain amount of guilty conscience and little enthusiasm, I started writing on paper with the help of various fountain pens in English and Sanskrit. I completed the ‘Bhajagovindam’ in Sanskrit with their English translation and ‘Thirukkural’ and their meaning by copying them from books. A few years back, when I was actively translating English novels into Tamil, I preferred to write them by hand. I still keep my manuscript of one of the famous novels as memorabilia.

Why did I do it?

I became scared that at one stage I may forget how to write with my hands as all my write-ups and essays are directly done on the PC nowadays. Both languages posed problems to me with their curves and complexities. Still, I persisted and completed them. In the same way, I take out the books I am still preserving to engage myself so that I shouldn’t lose the practice of reading. That might be the ‘nth time’; but never mind; I still could sit and concentrate and read and above all enjoy.

I cannot, but sigh with a sense of guilt when I see especially, the big wonderfully bound, neatly printed Oxford Dictionary from the shelf.