Some Best Books I've read

Well, well.

Received this interesting email from a (former) student from the class of 2010. Small excerpt below:

I’d like you to fill up the blank below



If there is one book that I would want all my students to read it would be ______



Let this book be anything – a textbook, novel, fiction, non-fiction or anything else that has influenced you in your teaching.

Here's my rather long-winded (to my surprise) response. Another trip down nostalgia lane.

Hi A,


Congratulations on your graduation. And good luck for the journey ahead.


And I can identify with the bittersweet feeling of losing student-status permanently. Yup, my engg and MBA student days were easily among the happier ones in my late adolescent period, I guess. But it was time to move on and move on we all do. Time changes everything.



There’ve been many books I’ve read at different times of my life each time thinking this is the likely best book I will read in a while, each time to be proven wrong. In my late teens, I was a huge fan of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Early 20s, I was so, so taken in by Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. Then in my MBA days, by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, then by Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (From the Ramakrishna Mission Publication series), later by JRR's epic saga The Lord of the Rings, then by RajaGopalachari’s Mahabharata-the mother of epic sagas. So each period, different book.


The book I would most recommend now, the one that influenced me most recently, is, easily, Pavan K Varma’s Becoming Indian.

Masterpiece, I say. A book waiting to be written, one that almost wrote itself. Indeed, if it were upto me, I would make this book compulsory reading for every graduate in each of India’s elite institutions – from the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Administration (where civil servants train) to the IMA, Doon, the DSSC and the NDC (where the military elite train) to the IIMs and the ISB (where the Business elite train).


It’s a keeper. A collector’s item. Hope you’ll enjoy and imbibe it as much as I did.


Jai ho.