Bedtime Stories….

What was your favorite book as a child? Did it influence the person you are now?

What a wonderful prompt it is!  Thanks to Project 365

If you know me, you would know I am an ardent fan of books. I adore them. Thanks to my parents who ensured that I had a friend by my side all along. They introduced me to reading at an young age and since then there has been no looking back. I wonder what I started with. I am sure they must have read it out to me before I could have managed on my own…It started with the cuddling up and their attempts to voice the characters. My father would read English books to me and my Mum would read Hindi books. And ofcourse Granny had her own stories to tell which always started from…. Once upon a time there was a …. either a lion or a king…magnanimous tales.. sometimes I awed at the number of stories she knew… Now I know she was a great story teller. Together they all contributed in making me a voracious reader and who I am today.

But now this gets me thinking again… Where did I begin?

Well, before I forget, I think it was my school where it started in the reading classes. Devdyuti Ma’am, made each one of us read two paragraphs. And the best part, she avoided the text books and always brought story books from the largest library that we knew, ofcourse the school library. To top it, there was a rule in the school three highest scorers of each class were always prized with books. Thus, as a child I won a lot of books and now I win them from publishing houses and authors… Wow! A book traces it reader! I have been a reader who has always loved to dive deep into the imaginative world of the creators and books have loved to come my way happily.

Who was my super favorite and has been all along?

Too tough to settle on one… I remember Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn came later in my life, wasn’t it Humpty Dumpty and then Pinocchio who attracted me first? And of course, I was very fond of the handsome Prince who appeared at the end to marry the leading ladies in all the fairy tales. I must have read Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Thumbelina with thousand gleam in my eyes till I had learnt the stories by heart.

By the time I was seven, Walt Disney, Enid Blyton Bedtime stories and the Christmas, Santa Stories began to make way in the small library that we had at home. All of them made me happier and wiser. Most of the times, either I would love the endings or one of the characters  so much that I would end up asking Dad if these things happened in real. My parents always said that good things definitely occurred. They made me believe that God did send his messengers, in the form of good people who helped the needy to escape from the worst. Just as Mother God fairy and the Dwarfs had done for Cinderella and Snow White. Thus, of all these books, it was always the fairy tales which attracted me most. They had an enigma about them. I loved the huge palaces depicted in pictures, the rosy gardens, large palatial homes, forests and their happy endings with the magical charm they cast on the readers.

All these books influenced me and instilled in me a faith that there was a savior (God) for all of us, one must  be good because fairies, angels and even Santa visited only those who remained good all year and one day a prince from far away land would come for me too… He he 🙂  and with time all my beliefs have met reality.

My advice to all the parents would be Read to your kids to make them fall in love with Books.

This is my Third Post as a guest author to Project 365 : We Post Daily!

Pictures: Google

Happy Reading!!!