Harry Potter and the Spell of his Movies

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opened on the big screen last Friday, and the world is lapping it up.
I remember I was excited when I was about to watch the movie of the first book, Philosopher's Stone(or Sorcerer's Stone for the Americans) because I had already read the first four books by then...yes I saw the movie very late, on a VCD, as I recall.
I was severely disappointed, and surprised as well, because a lot of my friends had recommended it to me.
Again, when I saw the second movie, I was disappointed.
Yet the world...the world of my friends that is, had largely loved these movies. Or had seemed to.
I realized that most of them had not read the books at that time, and a lot of them haven't by now either. Not all the books, anyway.
I feel a knot developing in my stomach when I realize that Harry Potter, for a considerable part of his fan following, is no one but Daniel Radcliffe. Don't get me wrong, he's a good actor, and he looks like Harry Potter as he was first illustrated on the cover of the Philosopher's stone. But Daniel Radcliffe isn't Harry Potter. Emma Watson (stunning although, she's grown up to become) isn't Hermione Granger. Rupert Grint isn't Ron Weasley.
No, Harry is Harry, Hermione is Hermione and Ron is Ron, as JK Rowling thought of them, wrote about them, brought them to life in her own mind, and in the minds of millions of her readers.
Nothing against the actors, but I fear the Harry Potter movies will be all that will remain in the minds of future generations of children, who grow up without the excitement of standing on the doorstep of a bookstore at 6 am(its India, they don't sell books at midnight, or atleast I've never bought one), waiting for the 5th, 6th and oh the excitement it was, waiting for the final book.

Look at the Lord of the Rings...amazing movies indeed, so much better than the Harry Potter movies, but half of the people who I know, do not know that they are actually books, written more than fifty years ago, by a genius who went by the name of Tolkien.
Oscars, these movies won... setting records, in fact, of Oscars won. These movies are but ghosts of the magic of Tolkien's hand.
How many of us know the joy of reading the Lord of the Rings, cover to cover, getting lost in its romance, getting absorbed into its mythology, its intricacy...its genius? Of reading about Frodo, standing at the brim of Orodruin, ready to cast the ring...the one ring, into the fires below, ready, but struggling with his demons, struggling with the evil that has slowly crept into his heart, from the day that Bilbo left him that ring.

I gave a little girl the first Harry Potter book once, on her eleventh birthday. She said she had already seen the movie. I implored her to read it. She did, and and a week later she called me and ecstatically told me how brilliant it was, and how she wanted to read the next one. I promised her, it too would be a gift. I plan to gift all of them to her, the seventh, Deathly Hallows, on her seventeenth birthday.
At least she will know the bittersweet joy of waiting for something that you love, looking forward to it.

The thing is, you form relationships with the characters who you read about in books, not with those who you watch in movies. It's a much more rewarding experience, is reading.

Yes, watch the movies, of course, and enjoy them.
But please... read the books, and love them! It seems like such a task, reading, to one who is not in the habit of it, but you see

'All that is gold, does not glitter...'
-JRR Tolkien