Like one of Douglas Adam's characters in the Dirk Gently series, I truly believe that the time spent in commuting is better spent in doing something worthwhile, so you can multitask. And just like the fellow in the story used to record his thoughts on a tape recorder and then have his steno type them out for him later - here is an attempt to write a post through a dicta-phone while driving from Delhi to Gurgaon and then converting it to text.
Many times my students and other people ask - what should I read. What should one read? .. A lot of times I give some perfunctory answer and let that question pass. Or sometimes I give a very generic response to this question. But mostly I am not very comfortable when confronted with this kind of a question. And although I have always had this sense of discomfort, I was not sure why it was so.
Recently, again, one of the students asked this question, and I decided to think a little bit more about it. Now when I started thinking about it, I realized that although the question on the face of it looks simple, it is not really a simple question with a simple answer that can be straight-jacketed for everybody - and say ok, you read this. This is something that you must read, or this is something that you shouldn't read.
I have always maintained that reading is like breathing. You go to do it, otherwise you are dead. On a more critical review of this subject, I realized that more than breathing, you can compare it to eating, almost like having a diet. And I guess that's where the sense of discomfort comes from. Because when someone asks me what I should read, we cannot give a straight-jacketed diet to each and every one, and hope that it will work. We need to prescribe it, customize it. It needs to be checked, needs to be evaluated, see whether it suits the person, what is the need, what is the purpose ... Some people are able to digest some things, some people cannot. Some people are allergic (!) to some things, some are not.
And so, the question of what I should read, is actually to be handled just like you would handle the question - what should I eat? ... Now broadly, I would imagine, just like a well-balanced diet, reading should have multiple aspects. And you could pretty much consider them similar to the four food groups that we learnt in school - carbs, proteins, fats and vitamins & minerals.
So you definitely need the carbohydrates, things that give you energy, things that keep you going, things that keep you moving. Now this depends on person to person. But to me, books on history, autobiographies, biographies, books on war, politics, books about great personalities - I guess those are the ones that give you strength, give you energy, especially in situations where you need them the most. They keep you going when you are down. So you would like to read about the Great Alexander, Napoleon, the freedom movement - about people and things that you relate to, people that you think are worth reading about. This could be considered as one group.
You do need books which give you the right ingredients to grow emotionally, and there are a few books which help you grow. My thoughts are not yet formed on this subject, so I may start rambling ... but that's the whole point of having a dicta-phone, right? So what are the four food groups - you have carbs, you have fats, you have proteins, and you have vitamins. I guess that's what the four groups are. I may be wrong. It's been too long I have attended school I guess.
Anyway, so I talked about carbs, and I think history books and autobiographies fit the bill here. Again, some books you might be able to digest, some you won't. You anyway can't eat a lot of carbs anyway, cause then they will convert into bad cholesterol (I am no dietitian, so pardon me if my medical knowledge is limited to general anecdotes). The point is you need to have a bit of them on a regular basis.
In terms of proteins - proteins help you grow, they build your muscles. And I would imagine that the books that typically would do that for you are books that you really enjoy reading. It would really depend on what you enjoy - meat, or poultry, or pulses. What do you enjoy reading? What do you feel good reading about? Is it popular fiction - the John Grisham variety? Or medical thrillers? Or Dan Brown?
For me it is a number of things - just to name a few: books on popular science and mathematics like Martin Gardner and Gamow and Jayant Narlikar, plays like those by Shakespeare and Shaw and Vijay Tendulkar (Ghanshiram Kotwal) and Girish Karnad (Tughlaq) and Vishram Bedekar and Sophocles and Chekhov, classical works like Dickens and Dostoevsky and Kalidasa and Homer (Iliad), Doyle's Sherlock Holmes ... ah, but the list is endless.
Now vitamins and minerals - these help give you immunity. And I would imagine books that help you give emotional immunity to face life's difficult situations are usually humorous books - comedies ... umm, read Saki for example, read Woodhouse. A nice afternoon spent even with a Calvin & Hobbes or an Asterix book or a Panchatantra - I don't know, whatever tickles your funny bone.
And finally, fats. You can't have too many of them. But you still need a little bit of them - you need them for storage of your strength, for your movements, for your body to work. Fats - I would imagine - would be books on philosophy, religion, a bit of mythology. We don't want to have a lot of these anyway. But you need some of this so that you are able to survive the winters. And to me personally, philosophy and mythology are two sources that keep one going in the long dark winters.
Mind you, I am not talking about the cheap, vulgar Chicken soup variety of popular philosophy, with the Ferrari-owning Monks and Morrises of the world, and the Alchemists who tell you exactly what you want to hear. Don't read those. Those are like eating fried bhajji - you might find nice reading them for a while, but they sure as hell are harmful for your thinking processes.
I am speaking of ancient scripts - like the Hindu Epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Bible, the Book of Five Rings, Laozi's Te Tao Ching, Buddha's teachings - and seminal works like those of Socrates, Plato, Descartes, the later day Spinoza, Hegel, Hume, Friedrich Nitzsche, Immanuel Kant, even Richard Dawkins - if your bent of mind likes that. Closer home you could read Dnyaneshwar, you could read Krishnamurthy - things that remain with you forever.
When I write this, I might add some more elements to this, but that is pretty much what it is. The point is just as you cannot eat everything, so you cannot read everything. You want to be selective in your reading. At the same time, you have to try everything. You can't just say, eh this will not suit me. Unless you try it a bit. So just like food I guess you need to try a couple of times, and if you think that that kind of goes with your appetite, your taste - then by all means you want to have more of that. But at the same time, you want to make sure that it is a well balanced reading.
And a well balanced reading will be a combination of different genres - humor, tragedy, suspense, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, science, history ... And sometimes you also need some 'lite bites' - so things like newspapers and weeklys - they are like peanuts. You know, you wanna have them sometimes, just as tidbits.
There might be certain things that you don't want, certain things which don't suit you. For example, overly religious books written in modern times don't suit me personally. Also, I particularly detest the so-called management books and the fads that they spawn ('co-creation', 'crowdsourcing', 'word-of-mouth', 'transformation', 'multi-sourcing', 'smart-sourcing', 'outcome-based compensation', 'situational leadership', 'expectancy', dogs, and cows and shining stars ... phew!) . I have never been able to complete any management book cover to cover (except maybe the Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt).
So the point is, if you don't like some books, don't read them. So that's what I started with - I can't really tell you what goes with you, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't, what suits you. That would decide what you should read.
And it's not enough to just read books. You need to digest them. Some of the books you will digest quickly. Some will take time. Some you will probably have to chew many, many times over. Only then - and every time you chew them, you probably find a new meaning, a new flavor, a new taste - and that's when the book starts getting interesting. Your interactions with the books start getting interesting. And that's when books start becoming your friends - as they say.
You don't develop friendships with books just by going into a Landmark book stall and buying half a dozen books - although that's a start. It doesn't work that way. What you need is an everlasting relationship with books. That can only develop over time, I guess. And by the time that happens, your choices, your tastes, your likes, your dislikes are already kind of known to you. So people who really like books don't ever ask me what should I read. They ask if I have read so-and-so book and what I think of it.
I hope you are able to reach that place soon and share this amazing world-view with me. Anyway, there is nothing better - nothing better - than a book, which you know, which you have already read many times, and you are re-reading and finding something new, something amazing, something that you can relate to. And when that happens, it's just unbelievable joy.
Signing off
- Shreekant
20 August 2013
Many times my students and other people ask - what should I read. What should one read? .. A lot of times I give some perfunctory answer and let that question pass. Or sometimes I give a very generic response to this question. But mostly I am not very comfortable when confronted with this kind of a question. And although I have always had this sense of discomfort, I was not sure why it was so.
Recently, again, one of the students asked this question, and I decided to think a little bit more about it. Now when I started thinking about it, I realized that although the question on the face of it looks simple, it is not really a simple question with a simple answer that can be straight-jacketed for everybody - and say ok, you read this. This is something that you must read, or this is something that you shouldn't read.
I have always maintained that reading is like breathing. You go to do it, otherwise you are dead. On a more critical review of this subject, I realized that more than breathing, you can compare it to eating, almost like having a diet. And I guess that's where the sense of discomfort comes from. Because when someone asks me what I should read, we cannot give a straight-jacketed diet to each and every one, and hope that it will work. We need to prescribe it, customize it. It needs to be checked, needs to be evaluated, see whether it suits the person, what is the need, what is the purpose ... Some people are able to digest some things, some people cannot. Some people are allergic (!) to some things, some are not.
And so, the question of what I should read, is actually to be handled just like you would handle the question - what should I eat? ... Now broadly, I would imagine, just like a well-balanced diet, reading should have multiple aspects. And you could pretty much consider them similar to the four food groups that we learnt in school - carbs, proteins, fats and vitamins & minerals.
So you definitely need the carbohydrates, things that give you energy, things that keep you going, things that keep you moving. Now this depends on person to person. But to me, books on history, autobiographies, biographies, books on war, politics, books about great personalities - I guess those are the ones that give you strength, give you energy, especially in situations where you need them the most. They keep you going when you are down. So you would like to read about the Great Alexander, Napoleon, the freedom movement - about people and things that you relate to, people that you think are worth reading about. This could be considered as one group.
You do need books which give you the right ingredients to grow emotionally, and there are a few books which help you grow. My thoughts are not yet formed on this subject, so I may start rambling ... but that's the whole point of having a dicta-phone, right? So what are the four food groups - you have carbs, you have fats, you have proteins, and you have vitamins. I guess that's what the four groups are. I may be wrong. It's been too long I have attended school I guess.
Anyway, so I talked about carbs, and I think history books and autobiographies fit the bill here. Again, some books you might be able to digest, some you won't. You anyway can't eat a lot of carbs anyway, cause then they will convert into bad cholesterol (I am no dietitian, so pardon me if my medical knowledge is limited to general anecdotes). The point is you need to have a bit of them on a regular basis.
In terms of proteins - proteins help you grow, they build your muscles. And I would imagine that the books that typically would do that for you are books that you really enjoy reading. It would really depend on what you enjoy - meat, or poultry, or pulses. What do you enjoy reading? What do you feel good reading about? Is it popular fiction - the John Grisham variety? Or medical thrillers? Or Dan Brown?
For me it is a number of things - just to name a few: books on popular science and mathematics like Martin Gardner and Gamow and Jayant Narlikar, plays like those by Shakespeare and Shaw and Vijay Tendulkar (Ghanshiram Kotwal) and Girish Karnad (Tughlaq) and Vishram Bedekar and Sophocles and Chekhov, classical works like Dickens and Dostoevsky and Kalidasa and Homer (Iliad), Doyle's Sherlock Holmes ... ah, but the list is endless.
Now vitamins and minerals - these help give you immunity. And I would imagine books that help you give emotional immunity to face life's difficult situations are usually humorous books - comedies ... umm, read Saki for example, read Woodhouse. A nice afternoon spent even with a Calvin & Hobbes or an Asterix book or a Panchatantra - I don't know, whatever tickles your funny bone.
And finally, fats. You can't have too many of them. But you still need a little bit of them - you need them for storage of your strength, for your movements, for your body to work. Fats - I would imagine - would be books on philosophy, religion, a bit of mythology. We don't want to have a lot of these anyway. But you need some of this so that you are able to survive the winters. And to me personally, philosophy and mythology are two sources that keep one going in the long dark winters.
Mind you, I am not talking about the cheap, vulgar Chicken soup variety of popular philosophy, with the Ferrari-owning Monks and Morrises of the world, and the Alchemists who tell you exactly what you want to hear. Don't read those. Those are like eating fried bhajji - you might find nice reading them for a while, but they sure as hell are harmful for your thinking processes.
I am speaking of ancient scripts - like the Hindu Epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Bible, the Book of Five Rings, Laozi's Te Tao Ching, Buddha's teachings - and seminal works like those of Socrates, Plato, Descartes, the later day Spinoza, Hegel, Hume, Friedrich Nitzsche, Immanuel Kant, even Richard Dawkins - if your bent of mind likes that. Closer home you could read Dnyaneshwar, you could read Krishnamurthy - things that remain with you forever.
When I write this, I might add some more elements to this, but that is pretty much what it is. The point is just as you cannot eat everything, so you cannot read everything. You want to be selective in your reading. At the same time, you have to try everything. You can't just say, eh this will not suit me. Unless you try it a bit. So just like food I guess you need to try a couple of times, and if you think that that kind of goes with your appetite, your taste - then by all means you want to have more of that. But at the same time, you want to make sure that it is a well balanced reading.
And a well balanced reading will be a combination of different genres - humor, tragedy, suspense, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, science, history ... And sometimes you also need some 'lite bites' - so things like newspapers and weeklys - they are like peanuts. You know, you wanna have them sometimes, just as tidbits.
There might be certain things that you don't want, certain things which don't suit you. For example, overly religious books written in modern times don't suit me personally. Also, I particularly detest the so-called management books and the fads that they spawn ('co-creation', 'crowdsourcing', 'word-of-mouth', 'transformation', 'multi-sourcing', 'smart-sourcing', 'outcome-based compensation', 'situational leadership', 'expectancy', dogs, and cows and shining stars ... phew!) . I have never been able to complete any management book cover to cover (except maybe the Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt).
So the point is, if you don't like some books, don't read them. So that's what I started with - I can't really tell you what goes with you, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't, what suits you. That would decide what you should read.
And it's not enough to just read books. You need to digest them. Some of the books you will digest quickly. Some will take time. Some you will probably have to chew many, many times over. Only then - and every time you chew them, you probably find a new meaning, a new flavor, a new taste - and that's when the book starts getting interesting. Your interactions with the books start getting interesting. And that's when books start becoming your friends - as they say.
You don't develop friendships with books just by going into a Landmark book stall and buying half a dozen books - although that's a start. It doesn't work that way. What you need is an everlasting relationship with books. That can only develop over time, I guess. And by the time that happens, your choices, your tastes, your likes, your dislikes are already kind of known to you. So people who really like books don't ever ask me what should I read. They ask if I have read so-and-so book and what I think of it.
I hope you are able to reach that place soon and share this amazing world-view with me. Anyway, there is nothing better - nothing better - than a book, which you know, which you have already read many times, and you are re-reading and finding something new, something amazing, something that you can relate to. And when that happens, it's just unbelievable joy.
Signing off
- Shreekant
20 August 2013
Nice! Your blog anyway answers this question very well! :-) Keep going.. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteK
Thanks Kayn! I don't get a whole lot of time to write on this one - am glad that you are following it :) ... Will try to get more regular. Take care, Shreekant
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