In spite of the extreme sensory overload I was subjected to, the biggest turn-on for me was a ten-year old boy, called Harry Potter. Harry Potter - a bespectacled, scrawny character created by a then unemployed (now rich) J Rowling, three years ago, while sitting in a café all day taking care of her young infant child. Imagine a marriage between Tolkien and Enid Blyton - Gollum attending St. Claire's or Mallory Towers. Rowling creates a new magical world, which lives side-by-side with the world of ordinary people (Muggles). And, in this world, Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts, the most famous school of magic in the world.

Harry Potter is already famous. As an infant, he foils the evil Voldemort, a dreaded sorcerer who has embraced the dark world, even though Voldemort manages to kill his parents in the same attack. Voldemort loses his power as a result of this attack. Harry is then sent to live with his uncle, aunt and cousin (ordinary people) who hide his past from him. Till the age of ten, he lives a Cinderella-like, suffering existence, until his entire life changes when he receives a letter inviting him to attend Hogwarts.

Hogwarts is like the schools in the Billy Bunter novels or Enid Blyton stories. All the classic ingredients have been included - the excitement of the first day of school, playing pranks on fellow students and teachers, breaking night rules for parties, getting into trouble with the teachers, the school houses and prefects, the big matches..... Here the game is Quidditch (an airborne game played with brooms, a cross between baseball and basketball) instead of lacrosse or cricket. The stock characters are also there: the intelligent, level-headed student, the mean, cunning one, the golden-hearted one, the prank-playing one, the perennially confused one, the firm, but fair teacher, the unfair, mean teacher, the proud teacher..... Even with all these cliches, the concoction works brilliantly. Instead of regular classes, the students attend lectures on "Potions", "The Secrets of the Dark Arts", "Herbology", "Transfiguration", "Broom-flying", etc. There are rules about when to perform magic and when not to. And the neighboring forests are populated with trolls, unicorns, giant spiders, living trees and the like.

Woven into all this, is the germ of an epic drama starring the evil Voldemort, the sagely Dumbledore, the gamekeeper Hagrid, the young evil-slayer Harry and his friends. I wonder where Rowling will take the epic....will she write one book for each of the school years and then stop, or will she continue with Harry as he leaves school and enters the wild world....or will she skip some of the school years and carry on. Will it remain a bit simplistic as it is now, or will the complexity grow with stories of yesteryears complimenting the present.... Rowling has already placed the nidi for these in the second book. In Tolkien's world, I know at the end that nothing new is to come, since he doesn't exist anymore. With Rowling, every book will be an event to look forward to, trying to see where she takes her world. I have always believed that it is easier to write about the world we all live in, than to create a brand new world with new settings, people, rules of behavior, etc. Which is why I place Tolkien and Asimov high up among the literary greats, though mainstream literature dismisses them off as fantasy and fiction writers. What a shame!

The pleasure I got reading both the books, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" was heightened by the fact that I managed to get the books by beating the existing system which limits your reading only to those books that our bookshops deign to stock. For more on this, read ("The Trouble with Mumbai Bookshops....). And the extra money I paid for the shipping was well worth the trouble. As one reader put it the last time....(thanks VP) "But see it from this angle, u want a book, search for it day and night and when u really get it, what fun it is: All these booksellers make u feel really ecstatic at such times, so should u not be thankful to them for making u reach both the extremes ? Emotions are very important in our life, u know". I am sure I can do with just the ecstasy of reading a good book - add on the ecstasy of finding it in the first place and I am not sure my nerves would be able to handle so much excitement. Even orgasms end quickly.........for the same reason. I am not sure whether Harry Potter books will ever be stocked in our local bookshops, unless some popular magazine like Outlook or India Today or a newspaper like Times of India does a big review and generates some hype.

Are the Harry Potter books for kids? That is how they are being projected, but this only means that kids can also read them.

And of course, if you don't like Enid Blyton or Tolkien or Asimov or Billy Bunter, you will probably think that I am mad. Which is okay, because if you really don't like them, I will pray for your redemption.....................in this world, at least.