Reading Glasses

An illiterate village man who could not read and write, but often saw people wearing goggles for reading books, thought one day, “If I put on these kinds of goggles like these men, then I can as well read books. I must go get one for myself”.

So he hurriedly went to a town with the sole motive of getting one. He entered a spectacles shop and asked the shopkeeper for a pair of glasses for reading.

The shopkeeper gave him various pairs of spectacles to test-run with a magazine but the villager could not read anything.

He complained to the shopkeeper that all the spectacles he just tested were useless for him.

The shopkeeper looked at his struggling customer who was trying to read a magazine he placed upside down, and said,

” Sir, what makes you think you can achieve what you are reading when it is placed upside down? Perhaps you don’t know how to read.”

The village man argued, “It is not a matter of not knowing how to read, I just want to buy reading glasses so that I can read like others. But I can’t just read with any of these spectacles.”

The shopkeeper tried hard to suppress his laughter when he learned the real difficulty of his illiterate customer.

He politely explained to the villager, “Sir, could you please let me educate your ignorance about spectacles?”

“Spectacles don’t make people read or write. They merely help you to see better. So the first thing to start with is to learn how to read and write.”