There's magic in the way your fingers turn a page.

Remember that first book that truly claimed you? Perhaps it was under a mango tree in your grandmother's courtyard, or curled up on the windowsill during monsoon rains. Maybe it was Enid Blyton smuggled under textbooks, or Premchand borrowed from an uncle, or mythology tales told and retold until the gods felt like family.

We Indian readers know something the world doesn't. We know how to find stillness in chaos. On crowded buses where bodies press against bodies, in homes where privacy is a luxury not a right, in cities that never quiet down we've learned to disappear into pages. One paragraph, and the noise fades. Two pages, and we're elsewhere entirely.

Our relationship with books isn't always straightforward. It's complicated by language, by access, by time. But that's what makes it ours.

I love watching readers on the Delhi Metro how they hold books like shields against the world, their eyes moving across pages while their bodies sway with the train's rhythm. I love the college students in Mumbai's libraries who sit for hours, one textbook open for duty, one novel hidden underneath for love.

The roadside booksellers of Kolkata, arranging their treasures on blue tarpaulins each morning. The second-hand bookshops of Bangalore where books pass from hand to hand, collecting fingerprints and margin notes. The small-town readers who wait months for a book to arrive, then read it so carefully, so completely.

We read differently here. We read despite and because of everything.

Some of us grew up with books everywhere, parents who filled shelves with worlds for us to discover. Others found reading against all odds that one teacher who noticed, that one library that opened doors, that one book passed from friend to friend until its spine cracked and its pages yellowed.

In my childhood home, books were both ordinary and sacred. They lived with us like family members. Rabindranath on this shelf, Narayan on that one. Panchatantra for moral lessons, Chandamama for monthly joy. The newspaper that my grandfather read front to back every morning, passing sections around the breakfast table like dishes in a feast.

Now I watch my niece read on her phone, novels delivered in episodes, poetry in Instagram squares, stories flowing through earbuds. Her reading looks nothing like mine did at her age, but her eyes have the same faraway look that readers have carried through centuries.

Because reading has never really been about the format. It's about the moment when you forget you're reading at all.

It's about finding yourself in someone else's words. It's Ruskin Bond describing a hillside and suddenly you're smelling deodars though you're sitting in a concrete apartment block. It's Amrita Pritam writing of partition wounds and your grandmother's unspoken stories rising to the surface. It's Tagore capturing a fleeting feeling you thought only you had ever experienced.

We read to remember we're not alone.

In a country of so many languages, so many traditions, reading is one of the ways we reach across differences. The Malayali businessman reading a Marathi novel in translation. The Punjabi student discovering Bengali poetry. The English-language reader exploring Urdu ghazals through transliteration.

Each book a bridge.

My favorite readers are the unexpected ones. The auto driver reciting Kabir at a traffic light. The vegetable seller who discusses Mahabharata variations while weighing okra. The security guard reading science magazines during night shifts. They remind me that literature belongs to no elite, no academy, no special class of people.

It belongs to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of a story well told.

So here's to you, Indian reader. To the way you make time for books in days that hardly have room for breathing. To how you pass books to friends saying "you must read this" with the urgency of someone sharing life-saving medicine. To your dog-eared pages and bus ticket bookmarks and the reading lamp that stays on too late.

Here's to the worlds you've traveled without leaving your city. The lives you've lived beyond your own. The words you've collected like shells on a beach, carrying them in your pockets, taking them out sometimes just to feel their shape on your tongue.

Keep reading. In whatever language feels like home. Whatever genre brings you joy. However you can, whenever you can.

In this ancient land of oral storytellers and palm-leaf manuscripts, of epics too vast to be contained in single volumes, of poetry sung in the fields and stories painted on walls you, with your book open before you, are continuing something precious.

Turn the page. We're reading together.