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10.10
Between Pages
How Books Became My Second Home
How it began
From a young age, I have been pulled towards books the way some people are pulled towards a cricket match on the radio. I don’t remember making a decision to read. It simply happened, quietly, in the corners of my childhood.
In the beginning, it was the familiar world of stories. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata arrived early, like visiting elders who stayed long and spoke in grand sentences. I didn’t understand every motive or moral complication, but I was mesmerised all the same—by exile, by vows, by battles that seemed to last forever. The Panchatantra followed, and I liked it for a different reason. It was clever. It had animals behaving like people, and people behaving worse than animals. Even then, it felt like a small education in human nature.
I read in bed, I read after homework, and I read when I was supposed to be doing something else. If I look back, that habit may have been my first act of rebellion—silent, harmless, and deeply satisfying.
History: the slow addiction
As I grew older, my reading changed its flavour. I began leaning towards history. Not because I was planning to become a historian, but because history has a way of explaining the present without shouting. It makes today look less dramatic and more inevitable.
I liked how a single decision made in one decade could echo across generations. I liked how empires rose with arrogance and fell with routine mistakes. I liked the small details—what people ate, how they travelled, what they feared, how they justified themselves. History, I discovered, was not just about dates and dynasties. It was about people doing ordinary things and believing they were doing something extraordinary.
Over time, I started noticing something else. The more I read, the less certain I became. That, I realised, is one of the quiet gifts of books: they reduce your confidence just enough to make you decent company.
The vicarious performer
There is a paradox in my reading habits that still amuses Bhavana.
I have no artistic talent. I cannot sing—at least not in a way that should be inflicted on other human beings. I have never performed on stage. I don’t play an instrument. Even clapping in rhythm is not my strongest skill.
And yet, I keep picking up biographies of people who live by music, theatre, cinema, and applause.
Bhavana sometimes asks, quite reasonably, why I read about musicians when I could simply listen to their songs. The answer is embarrassingly simple. I am not chasing the performance. I am chasing the effort behind it.
A great singer’s voice may sound effortless, but the story behind it rarely is. A composer’s melody may feel like it was born in a moment, but the moment is usually built on years of practice, rejection, and stubborn persistence. Reading these lives reminds me of something I already know from medicine: excellence is mostly repetition, and glamour is usually the final layer of paint.
So yes, I have spent evenings reading about artists—sometimes one chapter at a time, sometimes in long greedy stretches. Not because I want to become one, but because I like seeing how people endure the long, unromantic middle of their lives and still keep going.
The Marwari gene, slightly misdirected
K.K. Birla once said that finance runs in the blood of a Marwari, just as chivalry runs in the blood of a Rajput. When I think of my father, I can see what he meant. My father had a natural sense for business. He didn’t need a book to tell him what was sensible and what was foolish. He could smell risk the way some people smell smoke.
I, on the other hand, took a detour. I chose a medical college, a hospital, and a life that revolved around wards, rounds, and teaching. It must have looked like a strange choice from the outside—especially to a family that understood trade more instinctively than textbooks.
But genes, I have learnt, can express themselves in odd ways.
In the last decade or so, I have found myself returning to finance—not as a businessman, not as a trader, but as a curious student. I began reading about value investing and long-term thinking. I liked the discipline of it. I liked the insistence on patience. I liked the warning, repeated in different words by different people, that your biggest enemy is not the market—it is your own emotions.
I won’t pretend I became wise overnight. I didn’t. But the reading gave me a framework. It also gave me something else: the pleasure of being a beginner again.
Medicine on the shelf
Of course, a large part of my library belongs to my profession. There are books on statistics, study designs, critical appraisal, and Evidence-Based Medicine. These are not the sort of books one reads for comfort, but they do offer a different kind of satisfaction. They make the mind sharper. They keep arrogance in check. They remind you that certainty must be earned, not assumed.
Over the years, I have read these books the way some people do crossword puzzles—slowly, repeatedly, sometimes with mild irritation, but always with the feeling that the effort is worth it.
And then there are the books that sit beside them, almost mischievously: biographies, memoirs, essays, and cricket writing. I like the mix. It feels like my mind has multiple rooms, and each room needs its own kind of light.
Cricket, the parallel universe
Cricket has always been my other addiction—cleaner than sugar, less expensive than travel, and far more difficult to explain to non-cricketing nations.
I have enjoyed reading about cricketers not because they were perfect, but because they were tested. A batsman facing a hostile spell is not very different from a young doctor facing a hard night in the ICU: you breathe, you focus, you try not to panic, and you do the next right thing.
There is also comfort in cricket’s long format. It respects patience. It rewards temperament. It punishes vanity. It reminds you that you can do everything right and still lose. That lesson, unfortunately, is also useful in medicine.
The tactile and the digital
For decades, my reading life had a steady rhythm. I would visit a bookshop, scan the shelves, pick up a book, flip through a few pages, and carry it home like a small trophy. The book would then join its brothers and sisters on the shelf—some read immediately, some waiting their turn, some waiting far too long.
Then, in 2020, my children gifted me a Kindle.
I will admit it: the convenience is seductive. A book appears in seconds. No searching, no travelling, no “out of stock.” It feels like magic. It also feels faintly like cheating.
And yet, I remain an old-fashioned reader at heart. I still like paper. I like the weight of a book in my hands. I like underlining a sentence and returning to it years later. I like seeing books on shelves the way some people like seeing plants in their garden—quietly alive, waiting.
I also like the mild guilt that comes with it. My shelves are overflowing. There are books I bought with good intentions and never finished. Some have been waiting for years, staring at me patiently, like polite guests who have learnt not to expect too much.
Why I keep reading
Books have been my most dependable escape after a long day in the hospital. They have also been my most silent teachers. They do not interrupt. They do not argue. They simply wait.
Sometimes I read for knowledge. Sometimes I read for perspective. Sometimes I read for the simple pleasure of entering another life for a few hours. A good book has the power to make your own worries shrink to their proper size.
I may have stepped away from administrative responsibilities, but as long as there is a book nearby, I don’t feel retired in the mind. I feel unfinished—in the best possible way.