"I have just finished reading an old classic: "Confessions of a Thug" by Philips Meadows Taylor. The book was first published in Britain in 1839 to make the Victorian readers aware of the menace of the "Thugee". Essentially, the book is, as the title mentions, confessions of a Thug who had a long career in the business and was finally captured by the British and turned approver.

To those of much younger generations, Thugs were secretive groups of people who under normal circumstances were settlers in a village, purportedly engaged in normal trades and crafts. But during the travel season [in those days that would be after the monsoons and before the onset of summer], Thugs in organized bands took to the roads and highways with the express intention of looting travelers. The modus operandi too was very interesting. They disguised themselves as ordinary travelers and became a part of the convoy they planned to loot, and at an opportune moment in the journey they would strangulate unsuspecting travelers, bury them and move on with the booty. Each band would have specialist informers who would collect information of potential victims and their travel itinerary], specialist killer [who would strangulate the victims with their rumals] and specialist grave diggers [who were responsible or disposing off the bodies of the victims.

Because of the highly secretive nature of their business and connivance of the local rajas and landlords [who shared a part of the booty, this became a "menace" in large swathes of central, south and north India, till the British under Col Sleeman systematically hunted down thugees and gradually put an end to this form of banditry.

Confessions?. is the autobiography of one such Thug leader Amir Ali and covers his active life as a Thugee. It is a fascinating book to read for many reasons. First of all, it is the only such account which exists today in the written form. Secondly, it gives a vivid account of the political and social confusion that prevailed in most parts of India in between 1800 and 1850. And, finally, although a gory account of cold blooded murder and loot [Amir Ali himself is said to have strangulated over 700 people], it is a remarkable account of the syncretic nature of the popular culture of the age. To give just one example, although a devout Muslim, Amir Ali's best friend and confidant was always a Hindu and he and his fellow Muslim thugs never forgot to invoke Goddess Bhawani, who was the presiding deity of the Thugs.

It is a very rich autobiography on two counts: First it captures much more about the flavor of the period than many formal books on that period of Indian history. And secondly, it reflects the deep seated emotions, mental dilemmas, compromises and indeed principles of a man whom more civilized and genteel society would not have credited with such finer human expressions.

"Well, it would be difficult to get hold of a copy. But you can download the whole book from Google. Read it if you are interested in your past and I promise Amir Ali will not let you down".

"Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen? Jesus was crucified at thirty-three; Jack Kennedy was shot?at forty-six. I am twenty-nine years old. What have I done? What am I capable of doing? Who am I? "This is possibly the best line that describes Sasthi Brata's ulterior turmoil.

Story of a boy, a man and the main protagonist of "My God Died Young". Penned in the late 1960s, this autobiography has been immensely popular and successful, largely due to its unassuming style and youthful angst spoke to a whole generation of those times and perhaps does that even today with ?lan and ease.

In this explicit and irreverent autobiography, Sasthi Brata tells his life story, his increasing sense of alienation from his wealthy and extremely conservative Brahmin family, his traumatic experiences at school where the housemaster's moral lessons almost made a psychological wreck of him, his intense love affair with a girl whose parents married her off to the man of their choice, and his agonized search for roots which took him to England. Alternately tender and brutal, he lays bare the shams of tradition-bound society in India as well as in the West with his no-holds-barred honesty and astonishing insight and understanding. -- It was quite difficult back in those times to have raised issues, with a tinge of disgust, like faith and superstition, logic and science, fatalism and the freedom of choice but when I read this masterpiece in the present times I find it so relevant and I cant help but admire the genius of Shasti Brata. With due apologies to most of the contemporary writers, Shasti Brata and My God Died Young is one in a million example of a writer who doesn't have to pretend to be a writer.

"Thanks to the twin pressures of a Brahmin home and a nonconformist upbringing," Brata notes, "Most of the time I move around in the steel braces of subconscious inhibitions." Most Indians will be conversant with this feeling. Indeed, one of the arguments advanced by Brata's book is the extent to which our adult lives are in thrall to conceptions and attitudes formed in childhood. University at Presidency College in Kolkata, and a love of debating, freed him somewhat of these shackles. He studied science, flirted with fashionable Marxist ideas, believed he was a young genius and prophet, fell in love, agonized about religion, and contemplated his place in the world. Later, unhappy in enclosed, stratified India, he moved west, and decided to pursue a path as a writer. Everywhere he found that obstacles to his dreams lay not just in the conventions of society and the shape of his personal destiny - as some people like to believe - but also in something marshy and tortured in his own nature, even more generally human nature.

Brata's confessional language has a powerfully persuasive air. "I hated my family and since I was a part of them, I hated myself too." "My outward actions were frenzied and daring because the inner man was so tame and ordinary." "Even the most genuine emotion [I felt] was centripetal, tending towards myself in the centre, with the other person as an incidental circumference. I don't believe I had any real feelings. I sometimes wonder if I do now." "I move about in a thick viscous cloud, always looking over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching." "I was the shadow of a shadow. It is always hard to build a life on such foundations."

Some of Brata's phrases - fusty Britishisms, and curious analogies to English examples rather than native ones of the kind one can still find in, say, a professor of English in Kolkata - are a mark of his time and place and his education. The old midwife who delivered him "looked as close to the Witches in Macbeth as Shakespeare could have imagined them to be." How could Brata know how Shakespeare had imagined his witches?
My God Died Young culminates in a beautifully realized scene in which Brata, having returned to India for a visit, is persuaded by his parents to "view" a potential bride. Reluctant but also curious, he submits to all the rituals of the arranged-marriage experience, driving to the would-be bride's home with his parents, listening patiently to her father reeling off a list of her achievements, scrutinizing and being scrutinized by the gathered women of the girl's family. He asks the shy, veiled girl a couple of questions in front of the entire company, and hears her sing a song at his mother's request. Despite his reservations he is impressed with, even entranced by, the girl. At the same time the curious scene in which he is the chief player arouses in him a strange horror and repulsion expressed in these beautiful sentences that simultaneously evoke both a burgeoning, thriving life and a kind of moral blindness:
"The girl sat there like a Goddess. And for a moment I felt that no one but a Goddess could have her forbearance, her beauty, the sweet maddening melody of her voice. Restively, my eyes swung round to her, so calm, so removed, so enchantingly graceful like the swift green curves of spring. Then over the rest of those hard deadening faces, severe and resolute, presiding over the closing cries of an auction mart".

Many of my friends call My God Died Young a pensive, cranky book of a writer being both impatient with the hypocrisy of the world and despairing himself. Brata is always asking the question: "Why do we live in this way and not in any other?" This is why I feel reading someone's autobiography is a responsible job. Someone's upbringing may shake your sensibilities and cause a conflict and a war within thus creating minds that do more damage than any good. A word of caution, if you don't have a strong head on equally strong shoulders - just leave the book alone! "I wrote this book to try and understand myself," Shasti Brata says at the beginning (he was not even thirty when he wrote it), and autobiography, he knows, "demands honesty". This is the way every writer of any times must be able to write about his work and when you read that you know he means it. Frankly, I read it (and continue to do so) because I wanted to understand myself.

"Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen? Jesus was crucified at thirty-three; Jack Kennedy was shot?at forty-six. I am twenty-nine years old. What have I done? What am I capable of doing? Who am I? "This is possibly the best line that describes Sasthi Brata's ulterior turmoil.

Story of a boy, a man and the main protagonist of "My God Died Young". Penned in the late 1960s, this autobiography has been immensely popular and successful, largely due to its unassuming style and youthful angst spoke to a whole generation of those times and perhaps does that even today with ?lan and ease.

In this explicit and irreverent autobiography, Sasthi Brata tells his life story, his increasing sense of alienation from his wealthy and extremely conservative Brahmin family, his traumatic experiences at school where the housemaster's moral lessons almost made a psychological wreck of him, his intense love affair with a girl whose parents married her off to the man of their choice, and his agonized search for roots which took him to England. Alternately tender and brutal, he lays bare the shams of tradition-bound society in India as well as in the West with his no-holds-barred honesty and astonishing insight and understanding. -- It was quite difficult back in those times to have raised issues, with a tinge of disgust, like faith and superstition, logic and science, fatalism and the freedom of choice but when I read this masterpiece in the present times I find it so relevant and I cant help but admire the genius of Shasti Brata. With due apologies to most of the contemporary writers, Shasti Brata and My God Died Young is one in a million example of a writer who doesn't have to pretend to be a writer.

"Thanks to the twin pressures of a Brahmin home and a nonconformist upbringing," Brata notes, "Most of the time I move around in the steel braces of subconscious inhibitions." Most Indians will be conversant with this feeling. Indeed, one of the arguments advanced by Brata's book is the extent to which our adult lives are in thrall to conceptions and attitudes formed in childhood. University at Presidency College in Kolkata, and a love of debating, freed him somewhat of these shackles. He studied science, flirted with fashionable Marxist ideas, believed he was a young genius and prophet, fell in love, agonized about religion, and contemplated his place in the world. Later, unhappy in enclosed, stratified India, he moved west, and decided to pursue a path as a writer. Everywhere he found that obstacles to his dreams lay not just in the conventions of society and the shape of his personal destiny - as some people like to believe - but also in something marshy and tortured in his own nature, even more generally human nature.

Brata's confessional language has a powerfully persuasive air. "I hated my family and since I was a part of them, I hated myself too." "My outward actions were frenzied and daring because the inner man was so tame and ordinary." "Even the most genuine emotion [I felt] was centripetal, tending towards myself in the centre, with the other person as an incidental circumference. I don't believe I had any real feelings. I sometimes wonder if I do now." "I move about in a thick viscous cloud, always looking over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching." "I was the shadow of a shadow. It is always hard to build a life on such foundations."

Some of Brata's phrases - fusty Britishisms, and curious analogies to English examples rather than native ones of the kind one can still find in, say, a professor of English in Kolkata - are a mark of his time and place and his education. The old midwife who delivered him "looked as close to the Witches in Macbeth as Shakespeare could have imagined them to be." How could Brata know how Shakespeare had imagined his witches?
My God Died Young culminates in a beautifully realized scene in which Brata, having returned to India for a visit, is persuaded by his parents to "view" a potential bride. Reluctant but also curious, he submits to all the rituals of the arranged-marriage experience, driving to the would-be bride's home with his parents, listening patiently to her father reeling off a list of her achievements, scrutinizing and being scrutinized by the gathered women of the girl's family. He asks the shy, veiled girl a couple of questions in front of the entire company, and hears her sing a song at his mother's request. Despite his reservations he is impressed with, even entranced by, the girl. At the same time the curious scene in which he is the chief player arouses in him a strange horror and repulsion expressed in these beautiful sentences that simultaneously evoke both a burgeoning, thriving life and a kind of moral blindness:
"The girl sat there like a Goddess. And for a moment I felt that no one but a Goddess could have her forbearance, her beauty, the sweet maddening melody of her voice. Restively, my eyes swung round to her, so calm, so removed, so enchantingly graceful like the swift green curves of spring. Then over the rest of those hard deadening faces, severe and resolute, presiding over the closing cries of an auction mart".

Many of my friends call My God Died Young a pensive, cranky book of a writer being both impatient with the hypocrisy of the world and despairing himself. Brata is always asking the question: "Why do we live in this way and not in any other?" This is why I feel reading someone's autobiography is a responsible job. Someone's upbringing may shake your sensibilities and cause a conflict and a war within thus creating minds that do more damage than any good. A word of caution, if you don't have a strong head on equally strong shoulders - just leave the book alone! "I wrote this book to try and understand myself," Shasti Brata says at the beginning (he was not even thirty when he wrote it), and autobiography, he knows, "demands honesty". This is the way every writer of any times must be able to write about his work and when you read that you know he means it. Frankly, I read it (and continue to do so) because I wanted to understand myself.

Reviewed by: Ashish Kaul, sr. vice president, Corporate Brand Development, Essel Corporate Resources Limited.

One of the most influential business thinker-writers of our time, Tom Peters is back with a quick book on how to develop talent, sell it and be it. In his typical, informal `no-need-to-prepare' style, Peters declares that the new professional era is all about 'renewed individual responsibility'. The author says that in the new economy one cannot count on any job being there for you. What you can find is ways to move yourself along with your company up the value chain and into the heart of the new economy.

Structured into five sections, the chapter on talent is where he rubbishes the long-term association with an organisation as 'cubicle slavery'. To put it in his words, `Lifetime employment at a corporation (cubicle slavery) is out. Life-time self-reinvention is in. The only fool-proof source of job security is your talent. And your talent will express itself by building a scintillating portfolio of `Wow' projects. And to get on with the wow projects one has to think weird as the times demand.

So, it's all about taking responsibility of ones' professional life and taking charge of our own lives. People's professional qualities, not the character that matter now. He writes, " What coporates need is innovative, risk-taking, self sufficient entrepreneurs and not smooth-functioning organisation people," he elaborates.

The author drives home the point by citing the example of his own Wow project. "it was about rebranding my organisation, the Tom Peters Company which took about five years. The Daniel's formula can work the magic: reward excellent failures, Punish mediocre success.

On a lighter vein, Peters likes to call the USA, United States of 'Attitude' and stresses that the key factor to drive talent is attitude. The key to survival really lies in building a brand.

MK Anand, business head, Zoom has an eclectic taste in reading; but draws a sharp line when it comes to books on computer programming and engineering... in a candid chat with Nidhi Jain..

Who introduced you to reading?
My father is an avid reader. He describes his reading appetite as voracious.

Kind of book collection you have
History, Philosophy, Biology and Management.

On favourite authors and well written books
George Williams, Plan and Purpose in Nature. An absolute eye-opener in terms of understanding our motivations. To know why we do what we do. Brilliant Thyucidedes, The History, An account of the Peloponessian wars between Athens and Sparta.

Do you find interesting things in every book, how do you choose books you read?
Yes I do think that every book has something unique to offer. I choose books on instinct.

What do you think of self help books?
Not preferred.

Money and time you spend on books
Lots.

Your reading pace
Never in a hurry. About 40 - 50 pages a day when I am engrossed. Else about 10 pages.

Your first book
Nursery rhymes!! Then Enid Blyton, Franklin W Dixon.

Browsing and e-reading
Mainly Media Economics, for my PhD thesis.

Currently you are reading
Corporate Social Ethics, HBR .

Books that do not hold you
Computer Programming and Engineering books!!!

In Conversation With Zarina Mehta

"My favourite thing in the world is to sit on a beach (preferably Goa), sip a cup of tea and read a good book. I've read and re-read some of my favourite books doing precisely this!

I make it a point to read on all holidays, or in planes while travelling. Also, Sunday afternoons after a good dhansak lunch (or dimsum at Royal China) my husband Ronnie works on his computer, I sit by my balcony; which looks out on some beautiful trees, with my dog near my feet (snoring away), drink hot tea and catch up on a good book. My idea of happiness!

I probably have over 500-600 books or maybe more. I buy at least 2-3 books a week and read them. In fact, many of them are still lying at my parents' house as there is no space for them in my home! Noone really knows what books I like or buy, since I don't ever lend my books nor do I borrow them. If I'm attached to any objects in this world - it's my books! I can't stand it when people fold the page of their books to serve as a bookmark. It sort of drives me crazy!

My fetish and love for the printed word started when I was eight. Till then I was in the US and studied in an American public school. And when I came to India, many of my relatives sort of found it funny that I couldn't even read or write. To make up for the lost time, I took to reading with a vengeance. Now, I am a self-confessed bookworm."

My favourite books

" I keep away from books on the television industry since that is something that we deal with on a regular basis. My all-time favourite is Tolkein's, Lord of the Rings Trilogy; which I first read when I was 15. And recently I re-read it for the 9th time! It reminds me of the classic Don Quixote story? where a single, ordinary person fights against all odds to rise above the rest. And by far, the outcome is not important as Lord Krishna says in the Bhagwad Geeta. The fact that someone chooses to sacrifice themselves to fight for what is right is the key to this story.

It is, in fact this story which influences me in everything I do. A single person can make the biggest difference. So I believe it's important to try regardless of the consequences. If you succeed, it's wonderful and if you fail, that's alright too - at least you tried. You learnt something. This is why we all are here.

Some other books which I've enjoyed reading are Milan Kundera's - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, Love in the time of Cholera; and more recently Kurban Said's Ali and Nino is another masterpiece. These books explore the various shades of a man-woman relationship.

Some other authors I love are Amy Tan and Chitra Dwarka Banerjee, who have written some beautiful stories about women bonding; about the subtle yet strong relationships hey share.

Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay and Rohington Mistry's A Fine Balance, possibly the most exquisitely depressing book ever written. On a totally different track, I love books on Maths and Science and I've read all the Time & Life books from cover to cover! I remember reading another off-beat & fascinating book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav which is about the beauty of physics!

Currently, I am reading...

As of now, I am reading Swami Vivekananda's entire work. He is the most brilliant mind I've come across.His thoughts are a great source of knowledge and hope for all of us. I wish practitioners of today's so-called `Hindutva' read his books to understand the true meaning of Hinduism. I think, it's the most beautiful, tolerant and all-encompassing of philosophies. I am also onto another fascinating book by Thomas Friedman called The World is Flat. It clearly tells us that the future belongs to India and China."