Memories of Narnia

By John

H.RuolngulI was 13 or 14 years old when I first read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – one of the seven volumes of his classic, The Chronicles of Narnia. Perhaps because I had read it at an impressionable age and during a time when good fantasy books were hard to come by, it struck some chord within me and remains one of the defining books I have read. C.S. Lewis was one of the great Christian thinkers and writers who wrote the series between 1949 and 1954. The Chronicles of Narnia have deep Christian overtones and are part of approved reading for many church study groups in America.

According to some Christian websites, all seven volumes of the series can be profitably read as religious fables. From the first volume, The Magician’s Nephew, which is an allegory of the creation of the world and the origin of evil to the final book of the series, The Last Battle, which retells the coming of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment, the whole series is deeply religious, based on Christian themes. When I first read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I did not know that it was an allegory based on Christian themes.

I read it because it was there, and because I was at a stage in my life when I had started reading anything that came into my hands. There was a time in my life, at a later stage, when I once averaged at least 5-6 novels a week. Reading then was an appetite and a passion that could not be satiated. When the supply of new books/novels ran out, I would go back to my father’s collection of Readers Digest from the early 60s, nicely bound in hard cover by M/s Kamgo & Sons Bookbinders.

Pu Kamgo (father of Pu Biakthang, who passed away recently), was in Delhi recently getting treated for cancer. Though old and frail now, his mind and memories remain sharp as ever. We would occasionally go over to see him and listen to his tales of days gone by in his perfect Hmar which I once told him reminded me of the original thingtlangpa pronunciation of Hmar that my both my grandfathers spoke. He said that this was probably because he had spent a great part of his childhood in Khawllien before migrating to Lamka.

Though his reminiscence of the good old days tended to be repetitive after some time, I am writing about him because he somehow reminds me of those days when I had almost all the time in the world to read - a luxury that I sorely miss sometimes. I have often wondered if the youngsters of today read as much as some of us did when we were their age. The answer, sadly, seems to be a big NO, though it is difficult to blame them. Reading is a passion that is best acquired or passed on by parents – in this I had the benefit of parents who loved reading. My father is a pastor and was, and still is, considered a serious man who probably brings up visions of a man who studiously reads the Bible day in and day out.

Of course, he does all that, but I retain childhood memories of times when the best place to find that missing Phantom or Mandrake comic from the Indrajal Comics franchise was on my parents’ bedside table. We grew up with a good collection of Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes and other classics apart from my father’s Readers Digest collection which were neatly bound and stacked year-wise in the family bookshelf. Even when times were hard and money in short supply, there was still usually enough small change to buy the new Indrajal Comics along with the latest JS.

If you are too young to know what JS (Junior Statesman) was, let me tell you that many of us cried and died a little when Jug Surya wrote his last editorial sometime in the mid-70s – it was, and still is to some of us, THE youth magazine. We first became acquainted with Modesty Blaise through JS and got a glimpse of the fabulous lifestyle of our rock idols through its pages. It was a precursor of the many youth magazines that one now finds at the newsstand – a mixture of RSJ, NE Sun, etc. all rolled into one. But I digress. The point I am coming to here is that I do not know many parents now who love reading enough to pass the passion on to their kids. The problem is that if you do not have the passion, it is impossible to pass it on to your kids. After all, papa cannot preach what he does not practice.

There are those who do not have the passion but try anyway to instill the love of reading into their kids. A few with money to burn even have bookshelves adorning their living rooms filled with impressive looking encyclopedias and well-known classics. Many do not even seem to realize that without the passion for reading, having bookshelves lined up with the best books serve no useful purpose as far as getting their kids to read is concerned. Modern technology cannot but be blamed for the death of reading.

When you have 24/7 entertainment and hundreds of channels to chose from the idiot box, it is difficult to blame anyone for not wanting to waste time in reading. For the modern child, almost all the classics have been turned into celluloid, even The Chronicles of Narnia, and it is now much more easier and convenient to just drop into the nearest Cineplex and watch the movie in air-conditioned comfort, or rent or even better, copy/write the movie on CD. Then there are video games, the internet, chatting, and so many choices of entertainment that it is no wonder reading occupies the least of our priorities now.

Which is such a shame because many of our youngsters are growing up without knowing the pleasures of reading and experiencing the magical world created by one’s own imagination with the help of books that surpass anything Spielberg or Lucas can create. It therefore looks like we are now a generation that does not read and our interpretation of books is based on the version or images created for us by Disney, Pixar, MGM (are they still around?), Columbia, etc. So we have a generation all having the same technicolor dream and imagination based on someone else’s imagination.

Those of us who grew up without all these modern gadgets had the pleasure of using our own imagination to create our own worlds based on the books we read. We needed no interpreter of dreams. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the present generation knows all the right moves and all the right things to say because instant information is easily available on the World Wide Web as well as in the 100+ TV channels now available in every home. But the base from which their knowledge flows is like the one-minute noodles available everywhere which do not really satisfy anybody’s hunger whereas knowledge based on reading and hard labor is like our very own hmepok mixed with chartang and bits of changalhme and hmarchadeng, just the mention of which makes one’s mouth water, and really satisfy one’s hunger.

How else can one explain the mysterious absence of Hmar names whenever the results of any competitive exams are announced? It is time we realize that as long as we need others to interpret our dreams for us, we will never fulfill our potentials as individuals and as a society. Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough, but my own kids have never really bothered to read as much I would like them to. But recently, circumstances conspired to make our home a readers’ paradise – and my kids became caught up in the world of books. We never planned for it, but due to circumstances beyond our control, our TV flew off to Manipur – my parents’ TV got hit by lightning and we air-freighted our set to them as a replacement.

Then our computer went within a few weeks, taken away by our own webmaster. Left without any form of what we normally call ‘entertainment’, and it being too hot to go out, we took down our boxes of books collected over the past 10 years or so. Among them was a full seven-set Chronicles of Narnia, which I had bought years ago. My kids devoured the whole set within a week or so. With their imagination duly whetted, many trips were made to the books in the box and one treasure after another emerged to be devoured by hungry minds starved by years of being imprisoned by modern technology.

Apart from the latest gothic rock by Evanescence playing in the background (Music System’s still there), the kids became engrossed in their books. I’m glad some seeds have been planted and I can only hope that they germinate and bloom in due course. The upshot is that, we have been living without a TV for the last one month, but no one has so far seriously complained. There is, after all, a world beyond TV and computers. I haven’t seen The Chronicles of Narnia – the movie, yet. The ‘latest’ movie I’ve seen are at least 3-4 years old. I am waiting till I get to Tokyo where I hope to catch up on 3-4 years of movies, provided I get the time in between the readings that I plan to take up again, and I get the time from the government (and my lady). I just have to satisfy my curiosity as to whether the Narnia of my imagination (which I’ve had in my mind for the past 30 years or so) is the same as the celluloid version.