Reading and writing

This morning when I got up, the question that cropped up  in my mind was, why I read. It was not a strange question. I got a few answers. I was surprised to find that I write for the same reasons as I read. My reading influences my writing as much as my writing influences my reading.  Reading anything never goes waste. It produces experience; the best experience one gets when one finds that  some famous person also thought similarly as him. Plagiarism is not a bad eord. It is often repurposing. It doesn’t matter if the copier is inferior than the original. It is quite likely that one has thought about a point of view independently, may be 100 years later. Originality can’t be the copyright of only a few. One may not write like Rabindranath or Russell, but that doesn’t mean one can’t be inspired by them. As they say, the ecstacy of influence never wanes.  George Orwell beautifully expresses the purpose of writing,  ” I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world on which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” Neuroscience says,   we should read books like a writer.