Till I read Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In', I thought I was stupid because I couldn't finish reading a lot of books cover to cover. I wasn't a voracious reader, reading fifty books a year (or whatever those astonishing figures that Buzzfeed and Medium keep on tabulating) but I have been quite a stable reader, clocking somewhere between moderate and serious reading levels. 

It isn't really about the number or the speed really - it is more about how much I love reading and how books meant more and more to me, as I read more. Sometime around 2010, when I was overcoming a massively depressive phase of my life, my younger brother counseled me to take on a hobby - one that could cushion me from harsh realities of life and give me clarity and perspective. Depression and failure isn't something you could avoid, he told me with maturity way beyond his years, and neither could you have animate human beings at your disposal to ward off the miseries all times - inanimate wonderful pursuits like books, music, dance, and such, were the only way to survive dark phases. That's how I began reading (and writing blogs, intermittently) and grew out of pleasure reading mode to taking on more serious reading pattern that was therapeutic, rigorous and arduous - all at one. 

2010 was when I was fresh out of college, where I had trained as a lawyer, and prior to that I had pursued a year of English Literature. Setting into the real world - re jobs et al- could be very disorienting, once the honeymoon period of the first few months of salary hitting into bank account, wares off. This was the real world, and not college - and real people have goals and aspirations that are long term. I did have one a long term goal - to have my own business. Ever since I was a kid, I grew up wanting to work in advertisement and fell in love with consumer psychology. As easy as it was to want to be an astronaut or a tennis star as a kid, my grown up self knew how difficult it was to pull it off, and then, pull it off long enough, to be successful at it. 

Like the all things complex and painful, I turned to books. I had two clear set of reading types - one was the very popular business genre on economics, consumer psychology, behavioral economics, biographies of business leaders, which I will call 'Bus-Pop'. The other was the serious and tougher version of stuff that actually moulds the soul - the Philo-Cool stuff - as in the cool philosophy that came from a lot of reading of western and Indian Philosophies, reading Tolkein, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, Tagore, and a very eclectic mix that went from learning about painting to learning about coding. 

In my early years, the ratio of Bus-Pop : Philo-Cool, was about 80:20. Bus-Pop was cool as cucumber and Philo-Cool was as tough as stone - compare Thomas Friedman's 'The world is Flat', the first best-seller Bus-Pop I picked up, and Sarvapally Radhakrishnan's 'Introduction to Indian Philosophy' (which I still have not finished or understood the parts that I actually have). So distinct were these two genres that even if one didn't know which one I was reading, it was easy to guess - one I would reading lying on the couch, chatting with friends on my then-cool Blackberry, and the other I would read sitting upright on the chair and making notes diligently on the table. Former made me feel triumphant, and latter made me feel inadequate and slow. 

Over the new few years, I began to devour every single Bus-Pop book off the shelf with monstrous hunger, partly stemmed from the fact that I had chosen against a formal MBA and I had to catch up with all things MBA and Business Magazines subscribed to, and partly because I was growing older in law firm, un-happier, and felt that life was slipping by me.

As I read more, the more wary I became of the shallowness of Bus-Pop genre. A vast majority of them had one sentence proposition, which would then be repeated a million times, further supported by a few studies of sample groups done by cognitive researches, and then explained and illustrated through real life experiences of real life achievers in six chapters. Take for example, one of the last few books I read, is Carol Dweck's 'Mindset : The New Psychology of Success'. In this book, she argues that individuals with a 'growth mindset' lead a far more fulfilling life than those with 'fixed' mindset.  Let me assume that you have not read this book, and all you have is this one line summary - would it very difficult to understand the core principle of the book ? In the rarest of the rarest scenario, that this isn't clear, I will set out the proposition in more elaborate terms - those with Growth Mindset put a higher premium on learning and improving, and thus are not scared of failure, whereas those with Fixed Mindset stop learning, stagnate and get bowed down by failure. So there you have it, except the author explains, re-explains, and re-re-explains it with the help of about a hundred examples of different persons, spread over 200 pages. 

Or, take the example of David Brooks' "Road to Character' - where he argues that it is more important to be have 'eulogy virtues' (those that make good character qualities, like kindness) than 'resume virtues' (those that make good resumes, and we all know what those are already), only to explain this gregariously through the lives of eight great persons, spread over eight long chapters, picking up anecdotes from the lives of each of these great souls. 

Yet, books like these sell, and sell like hot cakes. The entire cult of such books that glorify the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, and make them into pop heroes of perseverance and growth mindset, together with an industry of videos on Ted, where there are thousand of videos that talk about the benefits of being perseverant and hard working. Tell me, what's new about that ? Did we not know that success comes from working endlessly, through failures, for a long time. If nothing, India's ancient phiolosophy text, Bhagwat Geeta, amongst others in other religion, have been propagating the same philosophy for centuries. 

It is almost believed that if one reads these books, one becomes an enlightened soul - there is something orgasmic, pornographic vulgarity that is rarely associated with philosophy, per se . Read one biography of Elon Musk, and you are almost a peer to him - giving the right to quote him and his life, to mark one's superiority over normal mortals. Musk (whom I greatly admire) sought his life's meaning from incredibly difficult books of the Philo Cool genre, including Lord of the Rings, 800 pages by Tolkein is not an easy read, though easier than the books on rocket science he usually reads. 

My deepest regret is that Philo-Cool doesn't become cool, and land up on hot sellers list, even though every great person, has, in effect, achieved enlightenment through these books.