Dehradun, Oct. 1 -- The Books from My Shelves

My personal library is my Mother Ship, my go-to place for my creative writing, professional work and, of course, the sheer pleasure of plucking an old favorite book from one of the shelves and getting down to the blissful business of reading.

I belong to the generation dubbed the late Baby Boomers. In the sixties, only the privileged few owned televisions so for the majority of us reading was our salvation, a chance to get away from the humdrum reality of everyday life, minding our social mores and coping with the three 'R's of education.

In our readings, we shared the adventures of our protagonists, seeing through their eyes the wonderful and exotic locales they visited and the exciting an...