say no to reading

its a given fact that we are a very visual species..well i dont exactly know of any other species that can read pictureless books from birth but we do understand much more quickly with a picture. its probably safe to claim that barney has accomplished much more in teaching the importance of cleaning one's room than a manual on personal hygiene. my childhood was spent on a lot of comics that had talking animals. they were all created by a couple called amar and chitra and usually began with "once upon a time in a jungle". though i was clever enough to understand that a bubble above an animal's head meant that it was talking , the fact that a monkey was talking to a crocodile or that animals peacefully assembled at a banyan tree under the auspices of a lion king to ostracize a cheating hyena completely slipped beneath the radar of my bullshit detector. the point is that i learnt most of my morals - looking before leaping , doing things slowly so there is no waste, never to leave a royal garden under the care of a monkey etc - from a rich visual medium.

then someone told my parents about one of the Rs. the argument for reading a book against watching a movie goes thusly - you use your own imagination when reading, you imagine places things and people to have a certain form and assume certain features. a movie takes away from this "wonderful" experience. so the argument goes, reading will improve imagination but it doesnt stop there. the other 2 Rs -'riting and 'rithmetic - would quickly follow making life hell. its double the effort - not only does one have to read, you also have to translate the words into pictures. i know now that imagination produces false images 100% of the time. it stems from assumption and you all know what assumption is the mother of.

lets just do away with all the reading and go visual. everyone would then be on the same page. until N T Ramarao came along everyone had vastly different images of lord krishna and ben kingsley is for all purposes the only gandhi i know. i hope u didnt spend too much efffort imagining while reading all this. i'll try to come up with a 10 panel comic strip to substitute this post but no promises because the only thing i ever did right in arts class was writing my name on the left top corner.