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    Why I Read

    It’s not about an academic interest in the study of the behavior of the mind of thought processes or the mind’s symbols and languages or of the development of knowledge for which I tend to take an interest in reading. It’s a plain interest in delving into other people’s minds that I read the philosophical and personal reflections of elated brains and enlightened souls. It’s my pure and secret fascination for peeping into others’ minds, others’ thoughts, others’ diaries, journals, and documented private accounts that lure me into reading such papers, such accounts.

    Discourses, dialogues, monologues, diaries, journals, letters, notes, confessions, memoirs, critical analyses, reflections, soliloquies, recollections, and philosophical gazetteers, are hence a private obsession, a secret habit with me. But it’s not an epistemological indulgence. I have no academic acumen. I am not capable of, or knowledgeable enough framing any hypothesis, any thesis, any antithesis, any analysis, or any synthesis from such thought fragments. But I seek an experience for sure, a certain kind of rhapsodic pleasure, a certain kind of intense elation, a kind of obsessive satisfaction in these theoretical constructs.

    A piece of beautiful poetry or a pitch-dark novel appeals to my senses and intellect and lures me into an artistic exasperation, but a philosophical or theoretical work arouses my aesthetic sensibilities.

    In personal accounts of people, in those most intimate of expressions, one does find the aesthetics of harmony with the inner being, with the soul, the spirit. That’s completely different from any kind of philosophical hypothesis, psychological construct, or epistemological synthesis. It’s not even called spiritual.

    It is a soliloquy with nature, dialectics with the self, or more clearly opening into (the path of self) realization.  Here we see the world as it is, not as what we would rather like it to be.

    Very different from literature, we don’t mix our emotions or imaginations into it here. We use pure logic and truth to the extent that the human brain is capable of conceiving and deducing a conclusion on a question we want to focus upon.

    Bharadwaj Mishra
    Bharadwaj Mishra
    Bharadwaj Mishra, 1975 Odisha born, a Delhi University Post Graduate in Social Sciences, with a professional career in banking for around two decades, is engaged in creative writing and with film society. As on date he has two English poetry collections published, “Farewell To Kalpana Saikia” (Author’s Press, New Delhi) and “Bathing Ghat At Kotipalli” (Athena Books, Bhubaneswar). He has published English Essays, Poetry and Short Stories with English language magazine of Kendriya Sahitya Academy, Indian Literature and few others. He also does English subtitling for Odia language films. He is single and lives with his parents in Bhubaneswar.
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