Survival

One of my favorite times at school used to be the annual prize-distribution day. I used to be pretty good at studies when at school, so unsurprisingly I used to be pretty happy on this day after collecting all my prizes (in my heyday I used to take home 10-12 prizes!!). Our school used to hand out books as prizes - I am glad they did that because that’s how my love affair with reading started.

I had just completed my first year at school and had entered class V (this “mystery” will be solved in a later post). That year I won one award – for coming second in my section in class IV. As I sat down after receiving the award, I noticed the book had Hardy Boys written on the front. I was pretty disappointed – I had never heard of the Hardy Boys and I had been hoping for a Famous Five book, the only “novels” I used to read at that time. I turned to the back cover and I noticed a line that read “The Hardy Boys fight for survival…”. Now I was doubly disappointed. I had no idea what survival meant but I sometimes used to see a TV show named Survival and it used to be a very boring documentary on wild animals. Putting two and two together (like a true Hardy Boy), I assumed the Hardy Boys were some kind of animal activists, or at worst animals themselves (like Timmy the dog). I wasn’t really keen on a book about animals.

Anyway, with a heavy heart I started reading it, and very soon was totally caught up in the action. If you have read Hardy Boys when you were young, you know what I mean. I was surprised on not running into any animals in the book, and that’s when I looked up survival in the dictionary.

Pretty soon, I was loaning lots of Hardy Boys books from the school library, and looking forward to receiving them as prizes. The prizes soon introduced me to the Three Investigators, the Five Found-Outers and the Adventurous Four. I devoured them all :)