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23/10/2026

India has toppers. But do we have readers?

We read for marks, ranks, degrees and jobs. Somewhere along the way, reading became a transaction — something we do to get somewhere, not something we do to grow.

But reading is more than preparation for an exam or a career. It builds empathy, deepens perspective, sharpens thinking and helps us understand ourselves and the world around us.

What if we stopped reading just to get ahead, and started reading to grow?

Let’s make reading a habit, not just a means to an end. 📚

21/10/2026

09/10/2026

Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Canadian poet is known for books like Autobiography of Red, a novel told in poems, and Nox, a book in a box written after her brother’s death.
Which one would you start with?

06/10/2026

Someone always took it away. A parent, a teacher, somebody. “Comics aren’t books. Go read your textbook.”

We were taught that knowledge means syllabus. If it wasn’t going to be asked in the exam, it wasn’t learning. Storybooks were for after the studying was done, if there was time, and there never was.

But a lot of us knew what the pyramids looked like from a Tintin book years before they showed up in a history lesson. Amar Chitra Katha handed a generation its history. Asterix dropped us into Roman Gaul. Ti**le slipped facts between the comics and made them stick.

Nobody sat us down for any of it. We just picked it up.

So if a kid wants to read comics, let them read comics.

What’s the comic you weren’t supposed to be reading?

01/10/2026

Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893 for not being white, with a valid first-class ticket in his hand. It’s the story everyone knows. The part we skip is that for years afterwards, in his writings in South Africa, he used racist language about Black Africans and argued Indians shouldn’t be classed with them. He was fighting one hierarchy while accepting parts of another.

Then came a second train. In 1904, boarding at Johannesburg for the twenty-four hour journey to Durban, his friend Henry P***k handed him John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Gandhi read it on the way and couldn’t sleep that night. He called the chapter about it, in his autobiography, “The magic spell of a book.”

One of the things it told him was that a lawyer’s work is worth no more than a barber’s. He didn’t only agree with it. He moved Indian Opinion to a hundred-acre farm outside Durban, where everyone did the same work and drew the same monthly allowance of £3, in his own words “irrespective of colour or nationality.”

A book didn’t make Gandhi perfect. It made him question himself. Changing your mind is harder than being right the first time.

Happy Gandhi Jayanti.

01/10/2026

You read the line.
Then you read it again.
Somewhere in the middle of the page, the words stop landing.
Your eyes keep moving. Your mind doesn’t.
So you go back. And back again.
It feels like you’re stuck.
But this is the part where the book is asking for a bit more of you.
Stay a little longer.
The good bits are usually on the other side.

28/09/2026

India’s greatest mathematician was fifteen when he found the book.

No university, no teacher, no money for books.

A friend borrowed one for him from the college library in Kumbakonam: G. S. Carr’s A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics, thousands of mathematical results printed with almost no proofs.

Ramanujan worked through it alone, figuring out the proofs and discovering patterns of his own.

That borrowed book helped set him on the path from Kumbakonam to Cambridge, where he would become known as the man who knew infinity.

It was never his. It didn’t have to be.

That’s the thing about books. You never know where they’ll take you.

What’s the book you keep meaning to open?

25/09/2026

Reading as a habit.