Reading is in vogue, evident in the way social media is going berserk with umpteen twitter handles, Facebook pages and Instagram hashtags sharing book-lovers’ not-so-guilty indulgences. Sparkling selfies with Kindles and book-stacks are the flavour of the season. We hope the fad is a little less ephemeral than the petrichor scents of the summer rains.
A quick chat with book lovers in the city gives you valuable insights into the world of books. Sriram Karri, author of The Autobiography of a Mad Nation and columnist, who recommends Ayn Rand, Victor Hugo, Albert Camus, DH Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Oscar Wilde, is reading Barkha Dutt’s In an Unquiet Land and Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness . Dinesh Balam, a former software engineer now working in Malkangiri on farmer issues is another avid reader who lists Ernest Hemingway, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, David Foster Wallace, PG Wodehouse, VS Naipaul and Herman Hesse as authors that have influenced him during his formative years.
Reading culture
Hyderabad, traditionally, has a reading culture reflected in its myriad debating, literary and slam-poetry clubs. Abids market on Sundays makes you realise how much the second-hand booksellers know about books, genres, awards and authors. Nag Ashwin, director of Yevade Subramanyam , a huge fan of JRR Tolkien, cannot resist these bookshops and lists HG Wells, Roald Dahl and Fyodor Dostoyevsky as his influences. Hemanth, a movie critic is presently enjoying Woody Allen on Woody Allen while Kishore, a film student now with a major production house, loves Haruki Murakami and Neil Gaiman. Venkat, a film writer and his wife Ranjani, a Carnatic singer have a proud collection of Murakami, Anita Desai, Richard Yates and Kannada author, Yashwanth Chittal.
Murakami and Khaled Hosseini find resonance even among younger readers like Samhita and Sravani, first-year B. Com and BA Literature students respectively, presently enjoying his Kafka on the Shore .
A visit to Walden or Crossword marks a rendezvous with bestselling autobiographies like Vinay Sitapati’s Half-Lion on PV Narasimha Rao and Karan Johar’s An Unsuitable Boy sharing shelves with Jeffrey Archer’s This Was a Man , Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of the-adorable- she-who-shall-not- be-named), AB de Villiers’ autobiography AB and Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk.
Urdu poetry books and translations are equally popular especially, those of Rumi, Faiz and Gulzar.
Devdutt Pattnaik’s Olympus , an Indian retelling of Greek mythology is another favourite. Pattanaik finds admirers in artistes like Kiran Mayee, a Bharatanatyam danseuse who lauds his book Jaya . Ramya, who has dabbled in filmmaking and writing, lists Women of Pride – The Devadasi Heritage by Lakshmi Viswanathan and Conversations with Mani Ratnam by Baradwaj Rangan as her personal favourites. Prashanthy G, an ISB alumnus and a freelance consultant, is binge-reading JD Robb’s ‘In Death’ series.
The beauty of the city lies in how seasoned readers can find copies of less-read books as easily as those of bestsellers. The Indian literary scene is buzzing and Hyderabad is a microcosm of the same!
