It irked  me no end and yet he stood his ground. Cribbing or cajoling  didn’t  help nor did temper tantrums. I just had to do as told and how I hated it. But now almost half a century later I am grateful for my dad’s persistence which bordered on obstinacy.

The written word has always fascinated me. As kids, all of us siblings were voracious readers. We would read anything we could lay our hands on; books, magazines, novels.  We would even finish each others course books before the term started. And although we didn’t read anything profound we just loved immersing ourselves in the literary world. The problem arose when we came across some indecipherable word. We would ask dad its meaning and his reply was always the same,

 “Use  the dictionary.” His logic was twofold, that we would learn the exact meaning and while looking it up we might take in an extra word or two.   

Theoretically it sounds very reasonable but  practically it was frustrating.  Imagine being in the midst of some very interesting narrative and having to take a break to check the dictionary. The task was made more tedious because this was before the advent of it’s online avatar.  Nowadays the meaning of a word is instantly available at the tap of a button. Back then it entailed getting off the bed which was my preferred perch and walking to the book shelf to retrieve the thick Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Then I would have to rummage through scores of pages and hundreds of alphabetically listed words till I zeroed in on the exact word I needed the meaning of. The continuity of the reading experience was thus lost, irreparably. I would constantly  complain but was compelled to do it nonetheless. He was relentless and there seemed no way around it. 

As I grew older,  I devised the method of ‘ploughing through’.  I would  read on, and  deduce the word’s meaning  by its  context. So as an adult if not the exact, I generally knew the approximate meaning of a lot of words.  This was possible because there was never a dearth of reading material in the house. This was quite a feat for someone  trying to raise four kids on an ‘honest’ government officer’s salary. Another of Dad’s principles, that books are above sanction, worked here. Once when I was debating whether to buy one because of its exorbitant price, he said that a book, in itself, is priceless. It is not expensive if you read it and learn something and its not cheap if you don’t.  Somehow his philosophy has stuck and I have read some pretty insipid books just because I had bought them. Its not that I didn’t learn from them. If nothing else, I learnt what I don’t like.

Recently when an editor  commented that I had an exceptional  vocabulary for a ‘doctor’ ( I am still not sure if it was a compliment!), I silently saluted dad’s doggedness for forcing  me to discover a word’s meaning on my own. He turned eighty three recently. Thanks dad and Happy Birthday. Keep teaching and keep learning.

(published in the Hindustan Times on 25/10/2018)