I’m sure it did.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s television had not yet come to India, and the radio played Indian music, not music you could sing along to.  Of course there were no computers, smart phones, or digital music either, so we had to amuse ourselves. We played board and cards games, hiked, and read…a lot.  The reading actually helped me learn to write, mostly on a subconscious level, I think--I simply absorbed how a good story is told.