The Greatest Gift !

A while back one of my favorite bloggers Preeti Shenoy asked this question on her blog. It got me thinking. Sometimes the best gifts that we get are not tangible objects but acts that end up changing our lives or at least influencing us greatly.
The best gift I ever got was from my grandfather. A teacher by profession, my grandfather was also a writer and a great dramatist. Whenever I visited my grandparent’s house during my holidays I followed him around like a shadow. Everyday I would accompany him on his morning walk and he would considerably slow down his speed to accommodate my small steps. Once we were out on a walk just after it had finished raining and we saw a peacock with its wings spread out, dancing in all its glory. These walks with him are one of my most cherished memories.
He was a great story teller and it was on these walks that he would tell me stories. They were usually out of the panchatantra or about some mythological character. One day I was pestering him for a story as usual when he suddenly asked me to tell him a story instead. I let my imagination run wild and told him a tale involving elephants and tigers and a village boy who befriends them. I guess something in my imagination must have caught his fancy because the next day he got me a note pad and asked me to start writing stories, poems or whatever came to my mind. He would read what I wrote everyday and give me his opinion. He taught me the secrets of story telling and encouraged and nourished whatever small talent I had for creative writing. He would be delighted when ever I got praised for writing a good essay in school or whenever something I wrote got published in a kid’s magazine. As I wrote in my post on childhood reads, I also had full access to his library and he is the one who introduced me to the magic world of books.
This love for literature and writing that my grandfather has inculcated in me is the greatest gift anyone could have ever given me!