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108 pages

English

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Autobiographical sketches and stories from India's best-loved writer in English. For over four decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his journals is, in his own words, "a celebration of my survival as a freelance'. The author's early forays into the literary magazines of the 1950s and '60s are described in the first part of the book, along with some examples of his work at the time. The sections that follow contain extracts from an unpublished travel journal he kept during the '60s, episodes from the highways on which he was a frequent traveller, and vignettes of life in Mussoorie, past and present. With understated humour and compassion, Ruskin Bond records the charming eccentricities of friends and acquaintances (a former princess cheerfully obsessed with death and disaster); the silent miracles of nature ("New moon in a purple sky'); life's little joys (the smell of onions frying) and its fleeting regrets. Nostalgic and heart-warming, full of wisdom and charm, The Lamp is Lit provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of "our very own resident Wordsworth in prose.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184754568
Langue	English

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Extrait

R USKIN B OND
T HE L AMP IS L IT
Leaves from a Journal

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
Introduction
Freelancing - The Early Years
Writing for My Life
All You Need Is Paper
Summertime in Old New Delhi
Walking the Streets of Delhi
Bhabiji s House
Break of the Monsoon
Tales of the Open Road
On the Highway
Rishikesh
Mathura
Jaipur
Vignettes of Yesteryear
Grandfather s Earthquake
Kipling s Simla
Life with Uncle Ken
The Typewriter
Mussoorie Snapshots
In Search of John Lang
The Himalaya Club (by John Lang)
Mukesh s Brush with the Art World
The Box Man
Ghosts of the Savoy
Bear in the Ballroom
A Handful of Nuts
By the Fireside
Leaves from a Journal
Envoi: The Lamp Is Lit
When the Lamp Is lit
Raindrop
Footnotes
On the Highway
Life with Uncle Ken
In Search of John Lang
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE LAMP IS LIT
Ruskin Bond s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far ) , essays, poems and children s books, many of which have been published by Penguin India. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999.
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955 and has never left the country since. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.
ALSO BY RUSKIN BOND
Penguin
The Room on the Roof, Vagrants in the Valley Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra The Night Train at Deoli Time Stops at Shamli Rain in the Mountains Strangers in the Night Scenes from a Writer s Life Delhi Is Not Far: The Best of Ruskin Bond The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories (ed.) The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories (ed.) The Penguin Book of Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)
Viking
Ruskin Bond: The Complete Stories and Novels
Puffin
Panther s Moon and Other Stories Room on the Roof
Sharing your feelings with friends and companions, you shackle your mind and miss the mark. Watch out for the danger of society, and wander alone like the rhinoceros.
When you become involved with a wife and children, you are entangled like a big bamboo tree. Be like a young bamboo tree, and wander alone like the rhinoceros.
People keep you company and serve you for motive; real friends are hard to find these days. People are insincere, clever in pursuing their own ends. Wander alone like the rhinoceros.
- From The Rhinoceros Horn Sutra Gandhari text, BC 1st century

When I was ten, I was lonely and read books.
At fifteen, I played football with other boys.
When I was twenty, I courted the girls.
At thirty, I thought time had passed too swiftly.
When I was forty, I concluded that I was a failure.
But at fifty, as I was still alive and well, I knew I was a success.
At sixty, I played old music and fell in love again.
At seventy, I went in search of old friends.
- RB
Introduction
There is no escaping the forces of nature.
When Newton sat beneath an apple tree and an apple fell on his head, he discovered the law of gravity. When I sat beneath an apple tree and a large red Himachali apple fell on my head, I discovered that, far from keeping the doctor away, an apple can give you a headache. So I shifted to another tree, a cherry. Cherries don t hurt, unless you eat too many of them. Suffice to say that I like sitting beneath trees : they make me feel younger, and occasionally I can write a poem or a story while enjoying their shade and the gentle flurry of their leaves.
A young reader recently wrote to me, saying: I want to be a writer like you, so that I can lie on the grass and do nothing. Lying on the grass and doing nothing is of course a wonderful occupation, but I did not survive as a freelance writer for over forty years simply by lying on the grass and counting ladybirds. If the grass is to mean anything, a time comes when you have to get up, brush the ladybirds from your shirt and trousers, and proceed to your desk to write, type or word-process all those ideas you get while sitting out there doing nothing.
During my idle moments I receive many good thoughts (and some that are not so good), but these thoughts have to be translated into intelligible and readable language if they are to convey anything to others. And that s where the hard but pleasurable work comes in. The composing, the revising, the rewriting.
The essays and episodes (many taken from my journals) in this collection may give the reader a picture of my life both as writer and person. In my case they are one and the same thing. I live through my writing, just as my writing lives through me.
This is not autobiography in the fullest sense. In my previous book, Scenes from a Writer s Life, I did trace my development as an individual and as a budding writer through my childhood and teens; but there is an equal amount of autobiography to be found in my fiction. The account of my mother s final illness in the story The Last Time I Saw Delhi says more than any factual account that I can give; sometimes it is easier to tell the truth by disguising it as a fiction -especially when the subject is a painful one. . . And perhaps my feelings for my father are best expressed in the short story The Funeral , although the funeral is a purely imaginary one; I was at boarding school in Simla when my father died in Calcutta.
The essays and journal entries presented here are factual and, to some extent, revealing, but they have been put together by me largely as a celebration of my survival as a freelance-this survival being as much the result of my stubbornness and persistence as of any talent that I may possess. I have known many talented young writers who gave up too quickly.
My early forays into literary magazines are described in the first part of this book, along with some examples of my work at the time. Most people think of me as a small-town or hill-station person, for that is what I have become; but I did spend four years of my life in London, and five years (summers included) in New Delhi. But it was only when I came to live in the hills, some thirty years ago, that I blossomed into the sort of personal nature writer and children s writer described in my largely autobio- graphical Rain in the Mountains. And I have learnt to laugh at myself. When I was younger, I took myself too seriously.
Recently someone asked me why I did not write on social issues. Well, I had always thought that man s relationship with the natural world was a social issue, but apparently he was thinking of issues such as caste, class, religious bigotry, the economic uplift of the masses, etc., all important issues, and all dealt with far more effectively by writers who are more gifted in that direction. I was hoping that there was still room in this world for a simple storyteller, one who strives to give pleasure to both child and adult, not by hiding our scars but by showing that we can be beautiful in spite of them. I find it easier to see God in a raindrop then in a place of worship. My credo, for what it s worth, is given in the last chapter, When The Lamp Is Lit.
Among writers, I am not one of the big guns. I am not even a little gun. I m just a pebble lying on the beach. But I like to think that I m a smooth, round, colourful pebble, and that someone will pick me up, derive a little pleasure from holding me, and possibly even put me in his, or her, pocket. Could you be that wanderer by the sea? I shall nestle there, close to you. I shall try to make you feel better. And if you tire of me, you can always throw me back into the sea. Perhaps a kindly wave will wash me ashore again, and someone else will pick me up.

This extract from my journal may be relevant here:
It is worth noting that some of the great story writers, like Gorki, were tramps. Stevenson did a lot of tramping before he settled down on his South Sea Island. On one of his tramps through Europe his sole companion was a donkey. They got on famously, and their journey together resulted in a classic travelogue, Travels With a Donkey. Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud, tramped about a good deal, all the while recording nature s bounty. Kalidas s wanderings in the Vindhya mountains gave him his incomparable knowledge of nature s ways, described with such loving exactitude in The Cloud Messenger and his verse dramas. Whitman s Leaves of Grass celebrates America s great open spaces. Conard tramped the high seas, commanding little tramp steamers, and then held a mirror to the sea in finely crafted novels and romances.
These were lonely men, wanderers rather than travellers. In spirit I have always been one of them, although I wander less today than I did as a young man. Although I have become a stay-at-home, taken up with family concerns and the necessity to make a decent income, I remain at heart a wanderer, and my heroes are Kim, Huck Finn, and Captain Marlowe.
I mention these great literary figures not in order that I might rub shoulders with them (we do that when we read their books) but simply to show that loneliness is a vital part of the artist s creativity. Even today, surrounded by loved ones, I am often conscious of being alone. Every man is an island, no matter how hard he tries to paddle away. A woman may often have the comfort of a child feeding at her breast; men grow up insecure.
You can be amongst people and still be lonely. The loneliest period of my life consisted of the two years I spent in Jersey, a real island, where I lived with relatives. They were not unkind to me, bu