5 priceless lessons Ruskin Bond's books taught us

There is hardly any bibliophile, especially in India, who hasn't heard of Ruskin Bond. An acclaimed author of hundreds of short stories, essays, novels, and books for children, Bond was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. Some of his popular books include 'The Room on the Roof', 'Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra', 'The Blue Umbrella', 'A Fight of Pigeons', etc. As Bond turns a year older today (May 19), here's a look at 5 priceless lessons his books have taught us.

Bond's 1990 novel 'Dust on the Mountain', which highlights the grim issues of deforestation in the mountains in the wake of modernization, taught us the importance of Nature and how it could serve as the best home for us.

"Once you have lived with mountains for any length of time you belong to them, and must return again and again," Bond wrote in the book. Furthermore, Bond's own life is a reminder for us to treat Nature as our home. He chose to spend his entire life in Mussoorie, a decision that he doesn’t regret for sure.

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We all know that it's excellence that we should seek in life. We should not settle for anything less than excellence. Bond teaches us the same lesson in his 1956 novel 'The Room on the Roof'. The novel revolves around Rusty, an orphaned seventeen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy living in Dehradun. Due to his guardian, Mr. Harrison's strict ways, he runs away from his home to live with his Indian friends. At one point in the novel, Rusty says, "I want to be either somebody or nobody. I don't want to be anybody." This is something we all should keep in mind.

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One of the earliest lessons we were taught as kids was to work hard and not to give up in life. The grandmother in Bond's 1985 novel 'Getting Granny's Glasses' is the perfect example of sheer grit and determination. Mani's granny is seventy years old and can hardly see through her scratched, old pair of glasses. They both decide to go out and buy a new pair of glasses, with only a hundred and fifty rupees in their pockets! The Nani's will is reflected in the following lines: "She was his Nani, and had cared for boy and father, cows and hens with great energy and devotion. Even her failing eyesight hadn't prevented her from milking cows or preparing meals or harvesting corn."

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"For every tree that's felled, we must plant two. Otherwise, one day there'll be no forests at all, and the world will become one great desert." These lines from Bond's 2009 book 'The Room of Many Colours' predicts the irrevocable effects of humankind's greed, which often results in the cutting down of trees, resulting in loss of habitat, increased greenhouse gases, soil erosion, flooding, and destruction of homelands.

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Life is constantly changing, and that's the beauty of it. And the following lines from Bond's 1966 book 'The Hidden Pool' is a reminder of the same: "New colours, new music, new life. Seasons die, and seasons are born again. The colours that are thrown are an expression of joy in the new springtime of life and young love."

The book centers on Laurie, an English boy in a small hill town in India, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Anil, the son of a local cloth merchant, and Kamal, an orphan who sells buttons and shoelaces but dreams of going to college. One day the three discover a secret pool on the mountainside, and it is there that they plan their greatest escapade yet – a trek to the Pindari Glacier, where no one from their town has gone before.

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