Reading for Pleasure: An Acquired Taste

As Mark Twain said "The man who doesn't read has no advantage over one who can't."

When Winston Churchill was a lieutenant in the Colonial Army, he stayed in Bangalore, & wrote to his mother to send books of Socrates, Plato, Gibbon, Malthus, Darwin & others. He would read for 4-5 hours daily. He writes in his autobiography that "life would have been intolerable but for the consolation of literature."

More recently, another Army man, Capt. Gopinath, writes in his autobiography that when he was in the army, he read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Sholokhov, Maupassant, Camus, Maugham & others.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, in his visionary book "Imagining India", has a bibliography, running into 16 pages, containing references from Dickens' "Sketches by Boz" to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

N. R. Narayana Murthy, another co-founder of Infosys, has reputedly more than 20,000 volumes in his personal library.

All these extremely busy people made time for reading is a measure of the love of knowledge & the pleasure in reading they had. But as the noted Kannada writer D. V. Gundappa wrote "Even if they have time, even literate people would rather do anything else than read."

In this matter, the achievement of J. K. Rowling in weaning children away from their TV screens to queue up before bookshops at midnight to grab & devour the latest copy of Harry Potter is indeed mind boggling.