Books and the Man
President Abdul Kalam was a frenetic writer; he wrote 25 books, and was a voracious reader. The main hall of his house after his presidentship—10, Rajaji Marg in Lutyens’s Delhi—was lined with book shelves on three sides, the fourth side had his beloved veena. There were books of all kinds, mostly biographies of the greats—Lincoln, Churchill, Marx, Newton, Einstein, many science books, almost everything by Stephen Hawking, many on world history, economy, politics and religion. There was an edition of the Quran on the shelf, with large fonts for older people to read, which he said he read from every day. The Gita, which he read daily too, was in the study-cum-bedroom upstairs. There was nothing else in the main hall apart from books, a rug in the middle and a chair. If guests came, more chairs were got from an adjacent room. President Kalam really did live among books.
A Longer View
Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter, the brutal story of sexual abuse of a young girl in an orphanage run by a spiritual guru, has made it to the Man Booker Longlist. "The violence shrinks from macro to microcosm, from the family to a host of children to the self, where it explodes as anger," wrote our reviewer Anjana Basu of the book. Young and affable Indian-origin British writer Sanjeev Sahota, part of Granta's best young writers in 2013, has also made it to the list with his The Year of the Runaways, about illegal migrant workers in the UK. They will be pitted against top authors like Anne Enright, Marilynne Robinson and Andrew O'Hagan for places in the shorlist. Till then, life will turn upside down, with book readings and author interviews, for Roy and Sahota.
