‘Where did this Reader’s Digest come from?’ my father asked me this morning.
‘I don’t know; maybe Salman ordered it’, I said
‘Doesn’t look like that’, he said holding the copy of the Reader’s he had picked up from the garage. ‘There’s something different about this copy; it’s not the subscription one’.
That conversation set me off on a journey down the memory lane. I remember, back in my childhood my father had a subscription for the Reader’s Digest (or the Reader’s, as we used to call it at our home). The latest edition of the Reader’s was always there on the table by my father’s bedside.
Reader’s contained everything, but not in an overwhelming way. It had stories of people getting lost in jungles, people falling in or out of love, it had stories of old people, stories of people bitten by sharks, cooking recipes, war stories, scandals around sports events, history, science everything.
My father had a subscription for the Time’s magazine as well, and I liked reading that too; but there was something sweetly different about the Reader’s. It was better. Maybe it gave the worldview, but not in the usual depressing way of the general news magazines. It wasn’t a news magazine, it was a magazine of life. The illustrations, the page quality, the language, the difficulty of vocabulary, content, everything was apt.
We used to get two magazines regularly every month Taleem o Tarbiyyat and the Reader’s. Even though abbu jan took subscription of Reader’s primarily for his reading, we all used to read it. Him, my mother, I, my siblings (sometimes). And then we would discuss different stories and articles at the dinner table.
I can’t remember exactly when or why we stopped receiving the Reader’s. Must have been sometime around start of my college days. Maybe got too busy with college books and readings, and didn’t notice that subscription wasn’t renewed some year back then.
I think magazines are just like people in the sense that they somehow use the same words more often to describe different situations. For example, doctors would have a somewhat similar vocabulary, Foujis (military people) have their own set if words they use more often, bus drivers have their own unique vocabulary; just like that different magazines have their own vocabulary. The Reader’s had it’s own vocabulary. It was one of the initials tools I used to develop my vocabulary of English language. Going through different editions of the Reader’s would help me develop sense of oft-repeated words in different contexts.
Many people ask ‘how to build up vocabulary of English language’. I did that by reading the Reader’s (and other books). Sometimes, I developed a wrong notion of a word as well, (e.g. for a long time I thought the word gloomy meant happy); but it was rare. (In my defense, just look at the word gloomy; how could you look at these two cute Os and think that it’s something sad, just saying.)
Not saying that I didn’t use dictionaries; but this was my preferred way.
As I sifted through the copy that my father had picked up this morning, I realized that this one is a special edition and a collection of articles, published in the Reader’s over a period of 90 years of its publication.
So, looking forward to some stimulating dinner table discussions again this month. The same old way… 🙂