Addiction?!

Monday morning
At the office

Swe: So how was weekend?

Me: I finished the book. The series actually that consisted of 4 books.

Swe: 4 books in 4 days?

Me: Hmm pretty much, I started on Wednesday night and finished on Sunday afternoon and there was office and outing on Thursday and Friday.

Swe: I stopped reading after college because I was getting addicted.

Me: May be I am getting too. 

Swe: You already are!

Me: [thoughtful] May be...

I wonder if there is such a thing as reading addiction. When does an interest become a habit, a habit a hobby and a hobby an addiction? I don't quite remember why I started liking reading. During the early days of school it was more so because we had a separate period for library and issuing a book was a more or less mandatory and since I never disliked reading, I always finished them before returning. It is not really that the books I read all belonged to library. Books were something I could buy anytime - no questions asked. :) After Xth it wasn't mandatory but we still had the period and I still issued books and I still read them before returning. After XIIth it boiled down to availability and choice. But I didn't much though. I guess I just enough found books never to have really run short of them.

So why do I really liked reading? I don't know. May be they were easier to keep than friends while I moved around. May be they helped me look at the world in a different way, provided me a way to escape. May be there is no reason. May be I got it from my parents or my brother. I don't know why I started but I know why I continue even now.

It starts as an effort to distract myself from thinking something. Something that makes me furious or sad or confused or scared. Something that I don't want to think about, something that I don't want to talk about, something that I don't have control over, something that makes feel helpless or hopeless. Something that keeps me awake when I so badly want to sleep. Or may be starts as an effort to drown the silence when I don't have anything to think about. And so I pick up a book. A book where I can drown myself so completely that I do not hear the voice or the silence anymore. Somewhere the story-line catches my interest and I read for the story itself forgetting the reason why I had picked up the book. Sometimes one book is enough and sometimes I continue to another and one more till I have exhausted myself. Till I look beside me and find a pile of finished books. And then I don't have anymore books to read. And I try to find one more. Buy, borrow or simply re-read something from my collection.

So would you call it an addiction? I don't miss my office or food. Sleep, I might miss sometimes. Although I can't guarantee that I would have slept soundly if I had not been reading. Friends or society - whatever you want to call that I would have missed even without the book. Or so I think. So... am I addicted?

And yet I don't think I have read a lot of books. So how can I say that I am addicted? If your answer is yes, may be I should start taking reading a little more seriously - just to comply to your opinion.

Life of (a new) Pi

As the world is moving towards a paper-free living, Idea came up with its new ad - 'the ped bachao ad'. And it makes more sense that Amazon should have tried to launch Kindle in India just a few months back. Although probably it did not click as expected.
And while iPad and Sony reader are yet to make way into the Indian Market, it seems India has come up with its own ebook reader - "Pi"

Read more here

The introductory price comes out to be 10k. You can pre-order it here for 999/-.
And in case you do can you please drop me the review after using it.

My brother bought a kindle long back (been more than a year now!) and ever since then I had been waiting for something like that to launch in India. And now finally the day has come.

But here is a list of my concerns:

• Does not support internet. I think it should support the USB driven net connections.
• Books are not part of the package. Will have to buy them separately. At least a few should have come with it.

That being said, it has some interesting features too

• It supports Indian languages but I could not find any regional language book in the site. (May be I missed them)
• Supports an array of formats like EPUB, PDF, EPUB, HTML, TXT, MOBI, DOC. So finding ebooks should not be a problem.
• For all those music lovers, it supports a music library of MP3 and you can plug in the earphones while reading.
• Says that battery life is 7 days. Now that is a lot of books for my kind of person!

And for any other specifications, please help yourself and find it on the net.

So now all said and done, I understand the concern of saving trees and hence a paper-less world but a book is still a book. What do you people think? How successful will Pi be?

Who Am I (Not)?

In one writing exercise we were given 10 minutes to write on the topic "Who am I?". We were strictly prohibited to write our resume i.e. name, designations, academic qualification, in short any of those things that we (and all others) use to identify us. We were also told to be honest. I was in a fix. How do I define myself (honestly)?. After pondering for some time, I ended up writing about "Who I am Not" instead of "Who I am".

Here is what I wrote:

Often when I am asked who I am, I respond with a mechanical answer consisting of my name, qualification, designation, and such things. But then, I wonder, had my name been something different, would my identity have completely changed?


My earliest memories of my childhood are of different places. As my father hopped from place to place for his job, I found myself amidst different surroundings - from dusty lanes of the villages to the concrete jungles of cities. Somewhere during those journeys, I lost my regional identity and although I learned the language, custom and traditions of all places, I cannot identify myself from just one of them. No, my identity is not confined to one region or one state.


School and colleges bear the responsibility of shaping a person. It is there that one finds one's identity and yet, I would not say that doing an engineering course has made engineering my complete identity. My job takes up 8 hours of my day, sometimes more, but it is after that, that I search for myself in something different, in a book, in a poem, in a new language to learn, in a new idea that will complete the missing part of me.

My identity is still in the making and as it spreads, I find myself renewed everyday.


It so happened that my 'non-identity' turned out to be a good piece of writing.