Books – To read or not to read

I love reading books. I was by no means a voracious reader till my late teens. After that, I devoured every book that came my way (fiction and non-fiction alike) and enjoyed them thoroughly.

But as I realized later, over the past 4-5 years to be precise, I did not like all books. In fact, I despised certain kind of books. I have generally disliked classics, self-help books and certain epics and autobiographies. The latest addition to this category are books by personalities who have made it big in life.

I read ‘A Better India, A Better World’ by N.R.Narayana Murty. After reading the book, I frankly didn’t understand why people were going ga-ga over the book. N.R.N talks about the fruits of development reaching the poorest of the poor, wiping tears of the poorest man and all that jazz. He talks about his dream of India – much akin to Vision 2020, and we all know how that turned out. The same issues, solutions and risks are being talked about for over 25 years now. I don’t get this – Did N.R.N know that Infosys would become such a huge company 20 years back? If he didn’t, then how can he even think of where India should be 20 years hence? The rate of change usually is so drastic, that any plan beyond 5 years is usually defunct. If you want to hear about how India should develop, ask any street vendor/barber/grandfather/anyone in India with spare time, and he/she will tell you 1001 ways India could improve. Sure, NRN makes some interesting points – and my grouse is precisely that. The points that he makes all over the book can be condensed in 4-5 pages – an Outlook/India Today article. Hammering us over 250 pages about the same thing over and over again is plain boring. An even worse offshoot of this – people who read that book come away thinking that in 20 years, somehow India would be this idealistic country that NRN proposes. The keyword is ’somehow’. A 4-5 page article would have had a greater impact on the younger generation (since it would restrict words to areas of development and the how of it) than the book (the rambling).

‘Imagining India’ by Nandan Nilekani, I expect would be no different from N.R.N’s book. I refuse to waste my time – again.

Similar is the case with Amartya Sen and C.K. Prahlad.

Amartya Sen with his ‘Argumentative Indian’ and ‘Idea of Justice’ expounds in an extremely flowery language – a language which needs a dictionary by your side all the time – about different topics. The topics by themselves are very interesting – but that is precisely what Amartya Sen tried to avoid. Instead, he chose to make his books a personal vendetta against the world – unleashing his intellectual stuff on unintelligible people like us. After reading 200 pages of each book, he made me promise not to touch his books ever again.

C.K.Prahlad, the acclaimed management guru with his book “Bottom of the Pyramid’. Frankly, what is this hoopla with ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ (BoP)? If you take it from an Indian perspective, the BoP subsists on Rs. 5 a day on average. Do you think that some business can garner a share of that Rs. 5 minus food minus household expenses? A better book (and I am no guru) would be to talk about how businesses can exploit the middle of the pyramid or the middle of the diamond – the middle class. 500 mn of them in India with aspirations touching the sky and a rising income to go with those aspirations. But who am I to comment on what he should write? I neither liked his style of writing nor the content of it. So I will let his books be in the bookstore in the future.

In the future, I will resist reading all such books by famous personalities unless someone I trust recommends that book to me. I must seriously learn to unlearn picking up bad books.

P.S: I have concentrated on Indian authors in this blogpost. Foreign personalitiess are equally bad, if not worse. Jack Welch (crappy), Paulo Coelho (juvenile), Classics like Ulysses (James Joyce), Great Gatsby, any self-help book (don’t even get me started) – I can go on and on about galactic mistakes such as these. Contrast these authors with PG Wodehouse, Saki, Jared Diamond, Gurcharan Das – it’s a difference beyond infinity.

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