How My Reading Habits Evolved

Most of us grew up reading some samples of what was considered good literature as part of our prescribed syllabus at school. Tom Brown's School Days was one of the books I recall from that list. I believe Charles Dickens was also on the list. Thankfully Shakespeare was not.

At the time, I despised history because it seemed like an exercise in memorizing weird names and meaningless dates. But that changed later in life. During weekends and summer holidays, I occasionally had the option to choose what to read. I mostly dabbled in what I could grab from my father's bookshelves. I was primarily attracted to non-fiction. For example, books on chess and The Way Things Work, which I would endlessly page through and must have read many times over.

No teenager can resist going through raunchy titles like Tropic of Cancer, which I borrowed from father's bookshelves for the sole purpose of finding hot passages. When I actually read the book later in life I realized it was a lot more than smut (actually there was very little of that). The book is about a somewhat unconventional, struggling, American expat artist, living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris. And, yes, he was a tad sex-obsessed.

Around the time that I was graduating from high school, I bought a copy of Atlas Shrugged from one of those roadside book vendors in New Delhi (perhaps Connaught Place). At over 1,000 pages, it was a rather big book and hard to get through, but I persevered because I was drawn to Ayn Rand's philosophy of living a selfish life. To a great extent we all do -- and must -- live selfish lives. As the air travel recommendation goes: "Put on your oxygen mask first, before helping others." Unless you're a little selfish you're no use to others.

My reading habits took a sharp turn when I cut my hair. I was born into a Sikh family. Orthodox Sikhs don't cut their hair or shave their beards. My paternal grandfather ran a Khalsa school in Peshawar (now part of Pakistan, following the Partition of 1947). Think of him as being somewhat analogous to the principal of a Catholic school in the West. That's the height of orthodoxy. So, me cutting my hair was huge smudge on the family reputation. Hence, my father disowned me.

This event catapulted me into reading about Sikh history in order to understand what it was about Sikh teachings that made my father so vehemently opposed to me cutting my hair. As you might imagine, I found that there is nothing (not a word) in the Guru Granth (Sikh scripture) about unshorn hair. All that was invented later, after the lifetime of the ten Gurus.

Sikh tradition attributes the rahit (code of conduct) involving unshorn hair to the tenth guru, Gobind Singh. But in all of my research including Guru Gobind Singh's own hukamnamas (handwritten orders) I have seen no evidence of it. As happens in other religions, priests and the establishment that wants to control the flock devise and interpret and reinterpret rules and regulations as they go along.

The point of this story is explain how and why my interest shifted completely away from fiction towards non-fiction. One thing led to another but I became fond of history and discovered that it satisfied a deep need in me to understand why we are the way we are today and perhaps what that tells us about where we might be headed.

To me, reading is a massive treat. It's an unparalleled privilege to have access to a distillation of another person's thought process and knowledge store in your hands; to be absorbed at your own convenience and at your own pace. Hail, Gutenberg!