Vinita was my classmate taking a postgraduate diploma in Journalism at the S. P Institute of Mass Communications and Management in New Delhi. We were travelling by bus one evening after the course. She was stopping on Mall Road where her retired father would wait for her to get home at Timarpur while I would get off at Model Town. I asked her why she had preferred to do MA (Literature in English) to other disciplines with better job prospects.

Her reply left me thinking. She stated it was her father, her only parent, who had persuaded her to go for literature. As a major in the Indian army, he was often away from home; so, Vinita would be alone and so greatly miss her father that she would feel lonely. She needed a strong mind to get over all the stressful and unpleasant conditions a young person of her age could face and literature was the answer: to study literature is to study life with all its ups, downs and exciting challenges; she was proud of having done literature.

Literature has so deep an impact on readers that authors keep receiving honour and praise, “Your book has changed my life, etc.” One such book is Sophie’s World, a didactic novel on philosophy by Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian writer. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, a 1,349 page novel tells the story of four Indian families after the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown as Number One New York Times best seller has been highly acclaimed as a masterpiece, a fascinating novel with its many twists. Who can forget J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter?

The novel as a literary genre has maintained its hold on readers for centuries. Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Les Miserables, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Devdas, The Grapes of Wrath, Doctor Zhivago, though works of fiction, are social documents of their times. They are still of great interest.

Though few readers care for poetry, almost everybody loves listening to songs and lyrics. As long as strong feelings like love, sadness, patriotism… exist, poetry will go on inspiring and stimulating interest. When Victorian economist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was suffering from a crippling depression in late adolescence, William Wordsworth’s poetry restored his optimism and self-confidence - a “medicine for my state of mind,” he called it. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1899-1964) in his last days was repeating a stanza from one of Robert Frost’s poems,

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

Poetry has much to offer in our complex industrialised world. It makes us wiser and better by revealing the beauty and truth God has set in men’s souls. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, steeped in the cultural ethos of ancient Greece and known as the “kingdom of gold” by John Keats, still live on. If the Ramayana speaks of the ideal society, the Mahabharata portrays our society. Because of their qualities and virtues, their heroes are considered as role models. The plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Racine, Corneille and Kalidas have had civilising influence for centuries. Human follies have been brought out and laughed at to make society more enlightened.

Hence, instead of planning to teach human values or citizenship education to children, it is high time the authorities made literature a compulsory subject. How true is Cicero when he writes that the study of literature nourishes youth. At this crucial stage of their development, young people will learn essential things from literature, which will matter all their life.

<B>Kaviraj SOHUR</B>