Books

I fell in love with books when still a little boy. My dad initially introduced me to a few children's authors (in both English, and in Bengalee, the local language where I was located at that time of my life).

Some of the Bengalee authors were absolutely phenomenal -- Sukumar Roy, Parashuram (Rajshekhar Basu), Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Shibram Chakrabarty, Syed Mustafa Ali, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Bibhutibhusan Banerjee and more. I enjoyed reading about 'Pagla Dashu', 'Lalima Pal (pung)', and Satyajit Roy's 'Feluda'. Bibhutibhusan's 'Satyacharan', or Sarat Chandra's 'Devdas' were very memorable and characters who impacted my conciousness and my imagination in very deep ways.

But I guess there was always something in my DNA that compelled me to be more drawn, as a moth to a flame, magnetically, inexorably and meteorically -- to the English language and also to Western Culture and the Christian Faith, in contrast to anything more conventionally and excusably mainstream Indian in context.

The iconic authors and literary characters who/which most impacted me, as a little boy, were children's authors like Enid Blyton, Franklin W. Dixon, Anthony Buckeridge, Laura Lee Hope, Carolyn Keene, Robert Arthur, Jr., Frank Richards ... I wallowed vicariously, daily and with religious fervor in the juvenile adventures of The Secret Seven, the Bobbsey Twins, The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Billy Bunter, Jennings and Darbyshire, Jupiter Jones and the Three Investigators, comic heroes Tintin and Asterix, and later -- detectives Sherloch Holmes and Hercule Poirot, to name but a few, graduating still later to P.G. Wodehouse and Nevil Shute (Click Here to borrow a few Nevil Shute novels from OpenLibrary).

And with these humble beginnings -- started my lifelong love affair with the English language, the language of Great Brittain and America. This is what opened doors for me and led me over time to imbibe the sublime oratory, rhetoric and prosody of Shakepeare and Shelley and Milton and Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King, Jr, and John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton and Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Barack Obama and ... Jhumpa Lahiri and Dr. Sashi Tharoor! The mighty and sublime English language.

A few of my teachers also had a very big influence on me in this journey to English. Subhas Basu, Indranath Guha, and Kavita Mitra (Oxonians, I believe, all of whom taught me English at South Point School) were but a few of the great teachers who not only stoked the fires of my love of English and of English books, but also my overall well-being as a scholsar and as a human being.

	Some of the other great teachers / proto-teachers who influenced me include Ms. Yashodhara Hanafi, Father Joris (St. Xavier's), Father Joseph Maliyekal, (also St.Xavier's), Neil O'Brien & John Mason (from the Indian Quiz circuit, these last 2 were not my school-teachers, but were in my life in other contexts, and influenced me significantly), and later Dr. Dub Ashton and Prof. Thomas Jensen in my American scholastic journey.

	On an unrelated note (of advocacy for the English language), I have this to say. Growing up around Indians, I was often ridiculed for being such an unmitigated Anglophone and Occidentophile -- with no feelings of Indian Nationalism/Patriotism whatsoever, and an unusual attraction for the British Raj narrative. So today, it is a fond pearl of empirical wisdom that I cast before nationalist swine, in India and elsewhere -- that the single largest ethnic group of English-speakers in the world today, are Indians (albeit including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Srilankans, Nepalese, Afghans, and their ilk). Although English is spoken only by a small and select section of Indians -- generally the educated, erudite and moneyed, the Aristocracy / Intelligentsia of these societies -- globally, there are more English-speakers whose roots are from the Indian Subcontinent, than the entire combined populations of the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand! And increasingly, many of the greatest contemporary writers in the English language, worldwide, are turning out to be from this select group, Indo-Anglophones' (of which species, I am a card-carrying member)! Irrationally no doubt, this thought fills me with great pride and joy!

I have been a voracious reader all my life. As a boy, I could not fall asleep at night unless I was reading a book, a habit that persisted into my 20s and even my 30s, when the pressures of business worries in my head and the pleasures of a girl-friend or wife in my bed finally weaned me off my lifelong bedtime heroine fix.

But since the 2000s (particularly after I started functioning as the CEO of a large Green Energy company across Central and Eastern Europe) -- as a conscientious objector to the killing of trees to make paper -- I have largely given up reading paper publications, preferring instead to do all my reading on electronic media, such as e-books, for instance.

And lately, I have discovered the joys of Audio-Books, particularly really great books which have a dramatized reading either by the author or by a great voice-actor / orator / speaker, e.g.,

Political / Patriotic

Villains who have weakened and damaged my America, the Land that I Love and would consider it a Privilege to die for:
DONALD TRUMP

My favorite Greatest American Heroes:
JOHN MCCAIN
BERNIE SANDERS

Although too vast and unmanageable a tally to enumerate, I list hereinbelow a (very small) few of my favorite books/readings, in no particular order.

Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend - Robert James Waller
The Bridges of Madison County - Robert James Waller
Zemindar -- Valerie Fitzgerald
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian - Nirad C. Chaudhuri
The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry
The Bible - Saint Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (328 A.D.) and Roman Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.)
The Purpose-Driven Life - Pastor Rick Warren
Дядя Ваня (Uncle Vanya: EN) - Anton Chekov
Три сeстры́ (Three Sisters: EN) - Anton Chekov
Вишнёвый сад (The Cherry Orchard: EN) - Anton Chekov
Чайка сад (The Seagull: EN) - Anton Chekov
Дама с собачкой (The Lady with the Dog: EN) - Anton Chekov
Попрыгунья (The Grasshopper: EN) - Anton Chekov
Мужики (Peasants: EN) - Anton Chekov
City of Love | Wiki - Rimi B. Chatterjee
1984 - George Orwell
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Also Sprach Zarathustra (DE; 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' in English) - Friedriech Nietzche
Caballo de Troya (Español; 'Trojan Horse; in English) - Juan José Benítez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
El alquimista (Portuguesa; 'The Alchemist' in English) - Paulo Coelho
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Browne
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Vinland The Good - Nevil Shute
Secret of Chimneys -- Agatha Christie
The Discovery of India - Jawaharlal Nehru
The Bhagavad Geeta - Krishna Dvaipayana (Veda-Vyasa Deva)
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Cien años de soledad (Español; 'One Hundred Years Of Solitude' in English) - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Amor en el tiempo de colera (Español; Love in the Time of Cholera in English) - Gabriel García Márquez
Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Español; Chronicle of a Death Foretold in English) - Gabriel García Márquez
The Celestine Prophesy - James Redfield
The Secret - Rhonda Byrne
Wings of Fire (An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam, former President of India) - Dr. Kalam & Arun Tiwari
Il nome della rosa (Italian; 'The Name of the Rose' in English) - Umberto Eco
La Divina Comedia (Italian; 'The Divine Comedy' in English) - Dante Alighieri
The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries - Marie Louise Burke
Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
This Present Darkness - Frank Moretti
Christ of the Indian Road - E. Stanley Jones
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Prince - Nicolo_Machiavelli