Stray reading

by Padma EDIRISINGHE

Ah! The thrills of stray reading, reading not compelled by any specific person or motive! Just reading for the mere pleasure of reading stuff that you fancy!. It engineers many wonders as transformation of time-weathered adults into wide eyed children, especially when making inroads into the bygone past or coming across odd souls who roam this earth... Best place for such surprises are old Reader's Digests that just warm you in their folds especially on chilly days.

I once happened to skip over a weathered and time-weary copy of the Reader's Digest put out in the 80s. Yes skip. For in a rare fit of house-cleaning I was getting rid of unwanted literature. But all that literature I first labelled as unwanted kept coming back for some reason or other and then I skipped over this RD copy, once thrown out and then on second thoughts picked up again for preservation.

No exaggeration, there were gems sparkling in it. Not exactly those ones shimmering with emerald, amber, russet, ochre, purple-pink and fiery orange and shedding brilliant lustre all around. They were just brilliant to me for they were flashing back in a strange way content matter I myself have dished out.

Just to give examples, about a month back I wrote on the peculiar situation where proponents of a certain project with all good instructions were busy instructing the younger inhabitants of a village how to collect data on their village and bank them in computers run with energy supplied from Seethala Dola, a water fall. It is a village minus public transport and motorable roads. It is a village where children walk miles and miles to the nearest school, passing a temperamental river too that blocks their journey back home making school attendance a matter of life and death.

Now in this Reader's Digest of September 1986 is this piece.

"A school teacher was appointed to a school in a remote village. On his first day he talked about modern science and how it helps human progress. He told about space craft and how man walked on the moon. When he finished his lecture, he asked if there were any questions. "Sir" one student asked "Could you please tell us when they will start a bus-service through our village?".

This spicy piece titled "Down to Earth" had been sent by a Ranjith Adhikaram, who according to surmise by the name has to be from Sri Lanka. But the name of the country is not given though the next subscriber's name, a C. Subrmanian is followed by "Kerala, India". Other than Riley Fernando's famous contribution of the Obituary of D.E.M. Ocracy this is a rare instance of a contribution by a Sri Lankan to this prestigious magazine.

Then about a year ago suddenly in a fit of reminiscing on Indian trains I did a lengthy piece that more or less conveyed the idea that though England invented trains, that the country that ultimately benefited mostly from this marvel in the transport field is India. But had I these statistics given in the piece "All aboard!" appearing a few pages away in the same magazine I could have penned a much more convincing article.

It begins thus.

"In India almost everybody travels by train. Each month, Indian railways carries more than 300 million passengers. The system started by the British in 1853 now has 38,000 millions of truck, making it the world's fourth largest after the US, the Soviet Union and Canada. The workforce of 1.8 million runs a fleet of 2,520 diesel, 1,004 electric and 7,245 old fashioned romantic locomotives".

Romantic locomotives! How romantic can a writer be who transforms these iron monstrosities to romantic conveyances! Spencer Davidson, the contributor had been writing his piece in 1986. So one can guage how much the statistics have bloated now, nearly 25 years later. Further due to the dissolution of the massive Soviet Union in the intervening period India skips one place ahead in the style of Susanthika skipping her way to the Silver medal. Here is Spencer raving over the influence these iron devils or Yakada yakas have on India's general populace.

"Villagers regulate their daily lives around the arrival and departure of important trains. Along with cricket, the railway is the country's favourite topic of conversation, with more rail buffs than perhaps any other nation. Each train is a kind of rolling club. Passengers climb aboard eagerly to see who else will be there and how they will pass the time".

He goes on to write about a Bombay diamond merchant who boasts that his best chess games were played in the Delhi-Bombay train. This train I myself have travelled, with Gujerati trading women of Amazon build, staring daggers at me for encroaching into their compartment, after a hard but failed attempt to reserve a seat in a station seething with what appeared to be the total world population.... Back to Spencer who ends his piece with this,

"And many commuters even use their regular train as a postal address, receiving ribbon tied bundles of letters with astounding efficiency".

James watt and George Stevenson in far away terrain around the coal mines of England who experimented with the first steam engines would never have imagined the limitless social possibilities a country so far away would find through their invention.

Of course, Spencer excludes certain facts that I have touched on, as how railway stations have turned into refuse for India's homeless and on how a large mass of the poor eke out an existence via India's massive network of trains.

The "Che" (tea) sellers at stations top the list followed by the Vadai sellers. Also in the list are the beggars with all sorts of contorted bodies, the contortions authentic or otherwise. That too may bespeak Indian ingenuity.

Towards the eve of elections I put out a piece titled "The issue of the white cloth" that could come out of only my own contorted mind. I had the audacity to bring in the doings of my Game Redi Nanda (Village washerwoman) into the formidable military world. Why did I write it.

I wonder. Perhaps to give publicity to this quote and thereby give my own humble boost to the side that deserves to win.

Probably the most important outcome of Sarath Fonseka's mis-adventure into the political arena has been his opening up a post-mortem of Tiger leadership."

I go through the RD to find some piece ancillary to this. No The year of the RD is 1986 when sparks were just appearing here and there, sparks of a gigantic drama that was to spring a shock on the whole world. Now the world is aware the extent to which the combination was mismatched and was loaded with seeds of its own destruction.