POTTER-mania
Too much of a good thing is probably the best way to make it seem bad. I am not espousing Oshoism but conveying my feelings over the current Harry Potter obsession even though I would be the first person to have misgivings about whether the Harry Potter books can be called as a good thing. The Harry Potter phenomenon was touted as the best thing to happen to Children’s books since Charles Dickens and the typical media hype about the number of copies that were being sold, the amount of money the films were raking in and the author going on to be the richest woman in UK gave it just the right publicity it needed. There were exalting reports of how the Potter had infused the kids with an enthusiasm to read books and weaned them away from TV and the net. But then, as the Harry Potter series swelled in number, the books got thicker and the subject matter became heavier, the ennui kicked in. Recent reports have suggested that the books may not have pulled out the young readers as was thought before. The New York Times even reported that “According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.”
I do not hate Harry Potter. In fact I have to admit I did enjoy reading them – all the six books as e-books. With the final book of the Harry Potter series set to be released in less than a day, I’m sort of relieved that I didn't fall for the temptation of pre-booking it. I’ll wait until someone converts it into an e-book and uploads it on the net. I was never a big fan of fantasy and even though I did dabble with reading fantasy novels like one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen recently and the Grimm Fairy tales many years ago, I could never really relate to the hype surrounding the young wizard and his gang of friends. Afterall, I grew up reading Dickens and Enid Blyton at a time when the term “Gay” could be used to describe the carefree kids without having any sexual innuendoes, and their depiction of school life in the English countryside and other adventures gave me more pleasure than reading about a boy wizard and his gaffes at Hogwarts. Even after so many years I still prefer the Rilloby Fair or the Ragamuffin Mystery to the Quidditch nonsense. J.K.Rowling can never measure up to the understanding that Enid Blyton had of children but, to her credit, she was quick to understand the futility of trying to draw the kids away from their Playstations and their TV cartoons for, with the Goblet of Fire, the Harry Potter series ceased to be solely for the Children and probably found its niche among the young and not-so-young adults. With all the buildup to the Harry Potter finale, which is a corroboration of how smart and aggressive media marketing can turn an unremarkable book into a bestseller, I am getting sick of Harry Potter, sick of all the websites, online forums, news articles debating if Potter would die, sick of people who try to find non-existent morals in an ordinary book, sick of people who actually do find morals in it and sick of people who find no morals in it and raise spurious allegations on religious grounds. I know I have to grin and bear it over the next few days and maybe after things quieten down, I can read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leisurely at some obscure website after knowing how it is all going to end.
