***For the love of books on World Book Day***

Some weeks ago, I saw a post (rather a re-post) by a friend on Facebook about celebrities suggesting books for young readers where Shilpa Shetty also (apparently) suggested ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell ‘to teach children about caring for animals’. Seeing that fb post brought back a memory of an incident, that I too had almost ‘unintentionally’ suggested a good book to a wrong audience. That was when a teenager asked me to pitch a good ‘classic’ to pick up for his upcoming long holiday. I was about to say ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ (by JD Salinger) but within a stroke of seconds realised that the boy was still too young to hold that book; vulnerable to be wrongly influenced by the book. 

No doubt, among the scores of novels I have read (in this yet short span of a life) there might be only very few books or even none, I belief, as smooth and as vivid as ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ I have come across, so far. The flow can sway you away to another life where you would ‘virtually’ live with the protagonist Holden Caulfield and witness all his (mis)adventures real-time. But boy, this is a book for the ‘ultra’ grownups only, already reaching a stage mature enough to dispel the influences and not easily carried away by the characters in books. To emphasize the risks ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ can pose to young adults, let us pick out few unfortunate incidents that had some kind of associations with the book:

*Mark David bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye just before he killed
            John Lennon.

**When the apartment of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey, was raided, they found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in the shelf. Another books they found in the apartment included the one Madam Shetty has suggested for children - Animal Farm. Even Wikipedia mentions that ‘Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States’.

Many of you who have read the novella ‘Animal Farm’ would compulsively rate it highly among the best books you have come across. This seminal work by the Bihar-born George Orwell is, no doubt, a masterpiece. The tones and the patterns are remarkably anti-socialistic but intrinsically progressive. This was the book which the CIA had used extensively to fight back the onslaught of communism in Europe at the height of the Cold War. Poland was bombarded with thousands of copies of this book so as to deter the Polish (or wean them away) from the influences of Soviet’s communism. Mind you, Animal Farm is politically bias, and may not be that suitable for young kids though ‘recommended’ by our very own Madam Shetty, period.