I must, of course, begin by congratulating The Book Review on her 40th birthday. For survival and growth with integrity, and for what it is doing to encourage discussion and debate, without which, as Romila Thapar and TBR have recently reminded us, we cannot have democracy. There are increasing signs that this is indeed the case. I was scared when I gave a talk on socalled Love Jihad recently. After Professor Kalburgi’s assassination, my mother called me to say I should install a spy-hole in my door, if I didn’t have one. Do not open the door to strangers, she said.
As protests by writers, artists, public health workers and indeed, even scientists, gathers pace over the shrinking of spaces for critique and discussion, we must celebrate one such space, TBR. It has over the last so many years, given me space, a political space, through the many reviews I have done. So I was flattered and honoured to write a note, a reflection on my affair with TBR.
It has given me and my students unimaginable opportunities to learn, to read, to grow and take sheer joy in books. And of course books to be read, and sadly, stolen.
It has been a journey that commenced in 1982, when I came to New Delhi, and met Prava Banerjee, now Prava Rai. Prava and Manjulika Dubey were then editing TBR.
I have always read, even as a young person. I had a certain modestly privileged background in Basavanagudi, Bangalore. My grandfather, a judge in the Mysore High Court, introduced me to books and western music. We had a Sanskrit tutor with whom we read Abhijnana Shakuntalam. My grandfather said he would find us someone to read Shakespeare with, but that didn’t happen. He told me I should have the Bible, all of Shakespeare and the Bhagavad Gita ‘by heart’. You can find any argument you want there, he said, and its rejoinder. Clearly, he expected I would get into the legal profession.
My father was an engineer, and he expected I would go into engineering. But I loathed maths, and wanted to do medicine to ‘help people’.