Kalam: Joy of Reading

In one line

Joy of Reading is a short essay in which Abdul Kalam says that books have been the companions of his life, names the three that formed him, and asks every Indian family to build a small library at home.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: Joy of Reading is an essay by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, collected in The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: The Righteous Life, in which he describes reading as the source of imagination and inspiration, recalls the books that shaped his own thinking, and proposes that every home should keep a library so that children grow up among books.

Who Kalam was, and why MU sets him

The man. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, born 1931 at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, the son of a boat owner, educated at Madras Institute of Technology, an aerospace scientist who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and President of India from 2002 to 2007. He died in 2015 while giving a lecture to students at Shillong.

Why he is on a law syllabus. He is the only living memory on this paper. Every other author here is a century or more dead. MU's course objectives ask for texts that inculcate "the importance of ethics, new ideas and human sensitivity", and Kalam is the piece chosen to speak directly to an Indian student about what to do with their own mind.

And why an English paper sets a scientist. Because the essay is about the habit that the whole of this course depends on. A student who does not read cannot answer a reference to context, cannot write a precis, and cannot analyse a text. The essay is the syllabus arguing for itself.

The argument of the essay

Four propositions, in the order the essay puts them.

One. Books are companions rather than tools. Kalam's claim is not that reading is useful for examinations but that a book stays with a person for life, and can be returned to in difficulty. The word he uses for books is the language of friendship.

Two. Particular books make particular people. He does not argue in the abstract. He names the books that formed him, which is the essay's method: it proves the general claim by a personal example.

Three. Reading produces imagination, and imagination produces everything else. For Kalam, who spent his life in engineering, the chain runs from reading to imagination to creativity to national development. That is why the essay's tone is not literary but practical.

Four. Therefore, build a home library. The proposal at the end is concrete and small: not a public programme but a shelf in every house, so that a child grows up in a room with books in it.