Extensive reading was my only achievement, besides three Masters’ Degrees.
We were born and brought up in the culture that was quite different from what we see today. There were no colour televisions, videos, mobiles, Internet, and other means of communication. Every year a few, five or six, movies were released and people talked for months about those movies. There was plenty of free time and books were the best companions. Some books we were prescribed to read and many others we read out of curiosity, and, in some cases, to add to our knowledge of the world which was unseen. Books used to be hard to find and visits to our local book shop were very frequent.
When I was in VIII standard, a foreign tourist, whom I saw in a local park, was reading a novel, enjoying the sunshine in that park. The sun is very rare in our mountainous part of the world. To my good fortune, and, sadly for the tourist, he forgot his book on the bench in the park.
When I saw the book, I was pulled to it and I picked it. The book was “Rich Man Poor Man” by Harold Robbins and its title attracted me. I looked around, trying to find the tourist, but he was nowhere to be seen. I brought the book home and hid it under the mattress of my bed. We were not supposed to read such English novels, though the elders did not mind it when we read Ruskin Bond, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Stevenson, and the other great writers of the past.
I was very excited because the very first page of the novel “Rich Man Poor Man” showed me the world which was never there in the books written by the writers I have already alluded to. I began to read a few pages every night. Harold Robins, as a writer, appealed to me and my curiosity doubled. It took me about nine months to finish that first real novel. That was the turning point. After that I did not stop. I began to spend most of my money on the novels written by 20th century novelists, though I continued to read the works of the old masters of the past eras.
Three Master’s Degrees! 3 laptops! ha ha just kidding,I loved your article,I love reading too although it will take me a lot of years to reach up to 19000+ books.Thanks for sharing 
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