Rigved

Rig uses a whole lot of books and creates castles with huge walls and then gets most of his toys and orchestrates an epic battle! All this (as in his earlier years) takes place in the afternoons quietly.

One regular feature is, the castle construction takes a backseat if while building he gets hold of a good book! Then the soldiers (toys) seem to be aimlessly loitering around the unfinished castle forgetting their differences while Rig reads the nice book!

Another small thing that happens is while playing a board game called Life. In this game if you are handed a ’share the wealth’ card by the opponent when you earn some money, you can give the opponent an ‘exemption card’ to evade sharing the wealth. For some reason Rig kept on calling it the ‘exTemption’ card instead.

Rig read his first Archie comic… it was a Jughead Jones double digest.

Rigved hasnt been going to school for the last 3 days for no really good reason… I was worried that he might be missing so much studies.. In this worry I went to see what he was up to.. he had cosily curled up on the sofa and he was reading a book called The Art of War, Ancient Chinese War Techniques…. I thought to myself… ah he is missing nothing…

He has created a model of Pingu out of white clay. He plans to color it today.

The reason why he is home is because he is supposedly sick. He has a bit of congestion but he is not really looking weak or coughing or sneezing etc. He plays with his toys, reads his books, laughs out loud, goes outdoor to play in the evenings, watches movies… basically everything except for school. I guess he is sick of school…

Some days ago Rigved told me that he is going to be in a band! So today I bought Rigved his very own acoustic guitar from Bhargava’s… Rigved wanted it for some time now and he was absolutely thrilled on getting it. I also got him a book on World War I… this too he wanted for quite some time now.

Just some time ago we saw The House of Flying Daggers… Its 2:15 in the morning right now and Rigved is reading a Satyajit Ray story called Fotikchand… I insisted him to read it as I read it last night and I was truly shaken by it. These days Rigved reads for quite some time in the night and goes to bed very late. The school began this week on the 16th (Banda’s birthday) and in the first week itself, he has been made the monitor, has got a few stars and full marks in a dictation test that he did not even prepare for. I sincerely feel that its due to his reading habit.

Rigved has started learning animation using Flash and he has shown some serious development on the basis of the very few basic things I showed him. He has said on many occasions that he wants to be an animator who makes films. He is at that age where inability to do something is not considered a setback… it is just a hurdle that one can jump over. Some times I feel that he is really gearing himself for a very big journey, a journey that doesn’t take him towards the North star, but makes him the North star.

Today morning Rigved woke up at around 9 and the first thing he did sleepily is got a book out and lay down reading it. The book was ´Bedtime Tales´!

At this moment, he is watching Narnia. He seems to be in the spirit of the movie as has used his hot wheel tracks as arrows and inserted them in the backside of t shirt like it was a quiver. Occasionally he will use many hot wheel tracks and other vertically blessed toys and stuff them in various parts of the clothes. At these times he looks like a very cute little tribal warrior!

Since Rigved´s accident we have been religiously reading The Lord of the Rings. We both sit and go through the epic at various hours of the day. I have to explain every bit to him and hence the speed is slow. Its been ten days and we are still on Fellowship of the Rings! I ve arranged for the DVD so that we can watch it after we finish Fellowship. So far we have finished 300 pages and 100 pages remain which we plan to finish by this Sunday after which we watch it with Banda. Rigved is really hooked on to LOTR and is getting impatient to get to anything about Sauron!

I love the line describing this epic on the backside:

The English reading world is divided into two kinds of people, One who have read LOTR and the other who are going to read it!

Today Rigved finished reading his first novel! The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage by Enid Blyton. With that he has officially finished reading all the books that he has. There must be at least 70 of them! They are mostly story books, not novels. All of these books have been bought by Banda except for an exception here and there.

Rigved sincerely loves reading. He just picks a book and starts off. In fact he will read just about anything at all. SMS, Book Titles, CD Covers, basically anything that has a decent font. Just yesterday he picked his first paperback novel by Enid Blyton called ´The mystery of the burnt cottage´.