A drawback of growing up alongside books about the most popular wizard after Merlin being published, was that I kept on believing it would be downright unfaithful on my part if I ever so much as even laid an eye on the back blurb of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings!
Such was Potter's spell on me and such was my crush on Ron Weasley that I lived a good part of my life expecting to see an owl pecking on my window pane in broad daylight and ramming into brick walls definite I would get through one sooner or later!
Everybody at home knew they would have to face a screaming banshee if they dared knock on my bedroom door while I was engrossed in reading Harry Potter (which I was 12 out of the 24 hours of day and night minimum)...such was my addiction to Rowling's magnum opus!
It wasn't until much later, that I (with guilt scorching the back of my mind) decided I could eventually learn to forgive myself if I gave another book about magic a try. Thus, I grabbed all the books of Terry Pratchett and C. S. Lewis I could find available in my school library. And of course, soon I found myself deeply in love with Mr.Pratchett and Peter Pevensie!
But then, there was still one book I was too egoistic to read! The book was none other than The Lord of The Rings. I actually was stupid enough to make a rule of my own, which forbade a Potter fan such as myself to read anything of Tolkien's magic world, which I understood (yet denied) to be of equally mesmerizing quality if not more!
However, this very snooty stubbornness that I used to pride myself on, slowly turned into a source of embarrassment when people would ask and I would (not as proudly as expected) say, "Umm..I haven't read The Lord of The Rings yet..."
Finally, only two days back, which is years (of enduring embarrassment) later, Tanzil decided to break the ice and introduce me to the Hobbits, and the Dwarves, and the Orcs. He gave me his original copy of The Lord of The Rings; notes, prologue, maps, appendices and family tress attached, to stimulate interest. He even gave me a vivid description of Tolkien's tale save the end, which he wants me to get to on my own.
With Tanzil breathing down my neck, suspicious I might abandon the book out of a Potter-stricken conscience, I am reading Tolkien's tale, and devouring every word of it. I am well into the second chapter of the first book. Now I know how Bilbo Baggins had got hold of the ring, or rather the ring had got hold of him, and how Sauron has risen again.
It indeed is nothing less than magic that has rendered the Potter-madness to take a back seat in order to vacate the front for Frodo. I can also see myself falling quickly in love with the ace language skill that Tolkien has applied in this narrative, which I am not being able to put down. In just two days, it has become quite unbelievable to think how armed to teeth I had been to deprive myself of the magnificance of Tolkien.
Even without Tanzil breathing down my neck, I am more than certain that I shall not rest till I have read the book from cover to cover. I shall not rest till I remember every branch in the family trees of the Hobbits. I shall not rest till Gollum starts appearing in my nightmares and I start speaking Elven! Afterall, how can I not be bound by the One Ring that binds them all..................How can I not?
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