An essay exploring the need to re-visit old books, and more.

Today marks a full-circle moment for me as a reader, 6+ years in the making. A sub-conscious itch has been scratched. I’ve re-read ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid and can now claim not only to have understood it but to have liked it too. But why should you, kind reader of the blog, care? Well, you shouldn’t, to be fair. But I hope you empathize with my sentiment of achievement. Because this book ‘launched’ my ambition of reading diversely, fuelled equally by unbridled curiosity and a bruised ego.

22^nd March 2014 was my last Board Exam. A rite-of-passage had been…passage-d? I came home in a mental state that was common to me then – happiness at having written the exam, with sudden pangs of panic that I’d made an error, my percentage would drop, no college, no future – the usual overthinking spiral. A string of stress inducing entrance exams were a fortnight away and nearly two years of analyzing sin θ equations, monkeys hanging from pulleys, and seeing how Cyclohexa-1,3,5-triene reacts(that’s benzene, if you recall), were to (hopefully) bear fruit. But that night I put that aside and picked up this book, having refrained from reading for recreation all this while.

I’ve since re-read many books, re-watched movies and series, re-heard soundtracks and podcasts. My opinions have changed and evolved enough to be branded as malleable, open-minded, fickle, or hypocrite – based on how you perceive them. But they’ve offered me the gift of time and distance, something that the 18-year-old me was only primed to use to calculate velocity. Now, something different always catches my eye in The Perks of Being A Wallflower, a book I’ve made a point to read every year. It’s also a placeholder in time. A barometer to gauge my velocity of being. I suppose the velocity instinct hasn’t died entirely.

My ‘Re-everything-ing’ (a terrible phrase, I’ll be the first to confess) basically does one of the following – reinforces my love for it, conjures a dislike for it, and rarely enough, offers a different point-of-view without impacting my enjoyment of it. There’s also a sense of comfort in re-watching movies and shows you love, seeing as though The Office, Friends, and Grey’s Anatomy were the most watched shows in recent years. I’m always caught up between trying new things and refining my views on those I’ve done before. Personal growth, I think, lies somewhere in between.

I now wonder if we’re all an age or experience away from ‘getting’ things we didn’t on the first go, even people, for the fact. The biggest takeaway is to not let yourself be set in stone. At times, I re-read my older blogs and feel it’s from another life. My concerns, so myopic. My expression, underdeveloped. I hope I can say the same for this too, in a few years.

Coming back to the night of 22^nd March 2014, I did not understand the book. NO. CLUE. WHATSOEVER. In hindsight, my failure was inevitable. An 18 year-old who had stayed in a single city and whose life revolved entirely around school and textbooks, even more so in the preceding two years, how was he to connect with the story of disillusionment of a young 20-something Pakistani Princeton graduate working in New York, feeling more and more jaded by the aftermath of 9/11? I had neither the life experience, nor the emotional vocabulary to relate. I had picked up that book because it was the thinnest one on my shelf, hoping to give my tired mind a break but I walked off with the double whammy of having failed to understand fairly simple English and a deflated self-esteem.

‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is a pivotal book for me because it was the first time I truly had to reflect. Prior to that, I had read in binaries – text whose interpretation was fed by teachers or mystery whodunnits who, beyond the act of discovering the perpetrators, left little work for the reader to do himself. This book opened a chasm that hasn’t filled but is beginning to. The bruised ego has healed but the unbridled curiosity endures.

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Which book/movie/experience has been your ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’? Let me know in the comments!