HEAVY DUTY READING

Speaking, reading and writing are extremely necessary skills of every human being. It can take you to the pedestal or leave you down in the dumps for all your life. Every person would love to have these but very very few are able to achieve even an iota of excellence in any of these modes of human expression and manifestation. If you look at the world around and would like to count people known to you, who are excellent in either speaking, reading or writing, any combination of these or all the three, you might find yourself at your wits end. Yet life moves on. No sincere efforts are made to improve the core skills of human life. Reading is right in the centre of both the skills.

The raison d’etre of human existence thus is reading. It connects both speaking and writing and impacts the quality of the two. That is why we keep talking about the well-read man. He is treated as a knowledgeable person. It makes you more civilized, better groomed and professionally more sound. While all of us read or are bound to read, but these don’t translate in the nature of either speaking or writing, we desire of, to make a difference to our lives. Some do pick up some skills of a mechanical variety, flowery language speaking the same thing, mostly content-less or writing on the same topic in a  similar manner, with no perceivable quality appreciation even over a long period of time.

Compare them with the likes of Warren Buffet, Shashi Tharoor, Saurabh Mukherjea to name  a few. Noam Chomsky, the ultimate public intellectual. Their excellence in the areas of their choice is remarkable. Their understanding is thought to be finest. Their capability to create a new narrative out of the same literature and experience is unbound. The confidence which emanates out of their reading. This is heavy duty reading. Heavy duty is an advanced stage of reading where do beyond the written, read the mind of the author, connect with all what you have read and experienced and bring it to life in the most worthwhile manner, useful to the society and the nation.

This is the intellectual capital, the prime mover of human existence. Reading is an exercise of the mind. Heavy duty reading over a period of time has the capability to create new neural networks in your brain. This elevates your cognition to a different level. You gain a research mindset. Your thoughts slowly become more and more empirical. You gain the confidence of finding your way in newer areas or finding a new meaning in the older areas. Heavy duty reading is a penance, which if you start relishing, would bring both confidence and comfort of unimaginable levels.