Killing the reading habit

After lugging around Lord of the Rings on luggage heavy trips, pleasure sojourns and short day travels, and not getting past the first 200 pages (readux), I conveniently left the Middle Earth back in India and came to Middle England. Not that it helped with my baggage problems - I was carrying 45 kgs instead of the stipulated 25 kgs, on the innocent hope that a contact behind the checkin counter will allow the assorted items like 5 kgs of rice, 2.5 kgs of wheat, 1 kg of rava, 1 kg of ghee, 500 gms of pickle, among other things to be passed unchallenged. In stead I encountered friendly fire.

"Are you freaking kidding me!! Did Mr Ocean not warn you not to carry Manisha Koirala's diet lunch with you? You will freaking make me lose my job."

Apart from the grub, lots of clothes and fancy dresses were discarded. It's extremely dull here in the UK.

Anyway, we were talking about LOTR. So, after insulting JRR Tolkien and his motley bunch of looney characters, I thought I should mend my ways and get into the reading habit. Instead I took 2 months to get through the 'Heart of Darkness'. It must be like a blunt Maasai spear through Joseph Conrad's skeleton buried somewhere in Canterbury.

Thus achieving unprecedented elephantine success in killing the reading habit, I am in a position to share my wisdom about to go about committing bibliocide.

1. Check mails (official and gmail) every 30 minutes - Only mails I get on official mail id when I am home is from System Administrator admonishing me about my huge size - of the mail box, I mean. In a way, I am comforted by the daily dose of identical automated messages from such a highly placed authority. I deliberately send myself spam, so my mailbox explodes and system administrator manifests himself

2. Buy TV - Waste money on TV license, Freeview (set top box) and develop slender toned thumbs through remote punching. Watch reruns of ranking programs like the Top 100 books of the last century.

3. Web Surf - read trashy and terrible blogs, similar to yours. Reread the good ones at home (the first 7 hours in office are spent sleep clicking on RSS feeds of these blogs).

4. Borrow more books from the library - You scan through the adopted books - a comic, an autobiography, a travelogue. Flipping through is interesting, so you read some more. And after two days, you are overcome with shame at ignoring your own books. You stop reading the borrowed books. And forgot why.

5. Download movies torrentially - With the immense back log of last year's acclaimed movies to be seen, its a race against time and bandwidth. Unlimited download on my ISP means that I have to pump it dry with download queues circling the globe 365 times over. BTW, Azureus is much better than ABC

6. Video chat - Discover the many pleasures of having a webcam and mic at your end and none at the other (folks). You do a video tour of the home for every guest visiting your folks and show where the washing machine and the clothes drying line is. Make silly jokes, the responses for which are a muted :-)

7. Marry