The book in my hand

A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read. This week, it is Vaiko and Vidya Balan.

A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read.

This week, it is Vidya Balan and Vaiko.

Vidya Balan

I am currently reading Urvashi Butalia’s

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India . [Butalia, through interviews conducted over ten years, tells the stories of the marginalised.] I would strongly recommend the book as it tells the stories of real people, the laymen who were affected during this period, which most books on this period have not done. I am reading the book to prepare for my upcoming film Begum Jaan .

Vidya Balan is an actor whose recent films include Kahaani and The Dirty Picture.

Vaiko

Though I have read it many times, I am once again reading Sathya Sothanai , the Tamil translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments With Truth , as I am going through a phase of trying times after the Assembly election. I also have with me Land of Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal. I will read it after completing Gandhi’s book. Before the election I read The Last Legion by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, a book that deals with the collapse of the Roman empire.

Vaiko is founder and General Secretary of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.