Yesterday, my daughter finished her first non-fiction book on morality and political systems and discussed the concepts with me. She has just commenced her journey in the 11th standard. I was quite impressed with the quality of discussions and the way she approaches the subject, and somehow recalled by my understanding of the world when I was in the 11th standard. I had nothing in my life except the PCM books, and day in day out busy solving the problems of mathematics and physics, and was not at all initiated into the world of books on different aspects of life.
I got my first book, "My Experiments with Truth," in November 2003, after writing my first mains for the Civil Services. It was a magical moment. So and so, my first three books are "My Experiment with Truth", "Emotional Intelligence", and "Freedom at Midnight". I was so amazed with my first contact with "life" that I decided to drop my examinations for the Company Secretary Finals to finish all three books. After that, there was no looking back, and to date, my favourite place is a book shop where I can spend hours finding books written on different concepts. I read numerous books on Psychology, Neurology, Astrology, Philosophy, and Quantum Physics. Reading books written by accomplished authors is one of the best ways to live life in different frames in a short period. Each author experiences life in a quite different way and pens down his precious experiences in his book. By reading his book, we get to explore his perspective on life effortlessly. The more perspectives we explore and the more we understand the "relativity" of all the frames of life. Our fixations on a particular frame of life, due to our social conditioning, get dropped. We can look at life from different perspectives and have empathy with the people having a different take on life. We also get the courage to enter the domain of the unknown and explore the domain of known as well as unknown passionately.
I feel that one of the worst things parents do to their kids is not reading books themselves. Most parents stop reading books after completing their formal education. As if education were a tool to get a job, and once they get the job, the purpose of education is done. They fail to realize that unless they read the books written by people who have explored life quite differently, they are not going to get that perspective. Usually, the people in the family, society, and the organisations we work in have a homogenous perspective of life. Unless we get to read the books written by authors of different subjects and coming from different parts of the world, having been born and brought up in different cultures, and doing experiments in different fields, how are we going to widen our perspective of life? If the perspective of the parents is narrow, how are they going to help their kids develop a wider perspective of life? The role of parents is not restricted to earning money and dumping their kids at some school, presuming that the rest is the responsibility of the schools.
If we love our kids, we will be concerned about their approach to life. We would want them to explore their lives to the fullest. A mind, fixated on any limited frame, can never explore life fully. Its actions will always be driven by the fear of losing hold of that frame. In fact, I am amazed to read about the freedom fighters. Almost all of them were quite well read. Be it Mahatma Gandhi or Sri Aurobindo or Bhagat Singh, or Subhash Chandra Bose. I feel that one of the best things we can do for ourselves as well as our kids is to read books coming from different parts of the world, diverse cultures, written by experts in different subjects. That will not only widen our perspective of life, but also inspire our kids to read the books. They will not be a prisoner of their own thought process. They will learn to challenge their own worldview and explore the infinite possibilities existing in this world rather than wasting their lives in a mindless pursuit of pleasures and comforts, justifying their actions to be right, criticising others to be wrong, holding their culture to be better than others, running away from fears, falling into the trap of some blind faith and caught into the divisions between right and wrong.
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