Reading, then and now

First there were letters, the black patterns that kept going against a white backdrop till they filled a line and then another. My barely four year old self looked at them with wonder and fear. Would I ever know what they meant? Would I ever be able to decipher them, let alone recreate them using those pencils that I barely knew how to hold?

Even in the early seventies, and even in a small and remote Indian town, children my…