April 12, 2012

The guy who doesn't read

In reply to "The girl who reads" ... (not a  food related post) and upon a reader's request:

The guy who doesn’t read simply doesn’t need books to understand what life is about, or how humans  act foolishly, or how systems and powers rule the world. He doesn’t read Oliver Twist books as he already knows that life is full of miseries. He doesn’t need Mark Twain  to teach him about civil rights. He doesn’t need Tolstoy to teach him about romance. He knows what nobility and chivalry even before reading Alexander Dumas’s novels.  He never read High Expectations but he knows in life one shouldn’t have high expectations on people and situations.

Talk to him about the authors of the books you read, he won’t remember their names or maybe he will.  He doesn’t have a vocabulary rich language that will make you lost or feel inferior.Neither will he make you feel as an outcast of his thoughts.



He doesn’t know what lies beyond climaxes, behind the twists, and he doesn’t expect an ending. He doesn’t bid farewells.. He is always optimistic of what life will bring.
He begins his own prologue and ends with his own epilogue. You don’t have to be his Anna karanina and suicide at the end of the story. And remember the love story won’t be full of pride and prejudice.

So, find the guy who doesn’t read. He is real.  He will fix the world with his own ideas, in ways different what the characters in books do.  He has his own genuine ways. His life is authentic.  He might be dull. But he doesn't compare what he did in life to what the soldier did to save a whole nation, or how the hero survived a continuous series of life's disasters or how the prince saved the princess. He gossips real stories not fairy tales.
The  guy who doesn't read will accept what life has to offer him, he will accept his family’s annoying habits, he will accept his friend’s faults. He doesn't judge.  Perfections and imperfections of people and societies are the stories he encounters everyday.

This boy has a plan to travel the world and not just through buying Guillever’s travel book. He yearns to go 20,000 leagues under the sea though he never read Jules Verne. He won’t be like Taghour to teach you philosophy and neither like Gibran to talk to you about the prophet. Nevertheless, he will have his own unique  philosophy and thoughts.

The guy who doesn’t read, doesn’t get bored easily.  You can always discuss the books you have, and he will be amused. He won’t be arrogant that he “already read this book” and shuts you up.
You will be the storyteller. You can be Tolstoy, you can be Shaw, you can be Hemmingway and you can be Mahfouz for him.  You can recite to him the gloomy poems of Edgar Allan Poe or the Odyssey by Homer.
He lived revolutions not through “The tale of two cities” novel.  He didn’t read Orwell’s animal farm to criticize Stalinism and communism’s policies.  He didn’t read Steinback to understand what capitalism and the greed for money do to people.

He knows about laws and criminal stories not through Grisham, and about the art of war not through Sun tzu.The boy who doesn’t read has an intuitive knowledge that he doesn’t need to read Huxley's “A  Brave New World" to learn that drugs are bad and that the novel developments in reproductive technology aim to change and control society.

Most importantly, he knows that life to be fulfilled, needs someone to act, not just read.
So, the guy who doesn’t read doesn’t sit in the corner of the café, instead he mingles with people. On the train or on the bus, you will see him helping old ladies and children and not immersed in his own world and holding a book. In the library, he will be searching and chasing knowledge and he won’t have merely found it through a book. In his room, he wont be pondering with the stories of authors who are dead. He would be  fixing something, creating a concept, and maybe designing …

The guy who doesn’t read doesn’t want his life to be written in a book or maybe he does want.
 He will sometimes be like Shahrayar waiting in vain to listen to the stories of Scheherazade. So,  he will pretend that he doesn’t read so that he hears yours and other people’s stories.

But eventually, he will read few books every now and then.

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