India, April 23 -- Contd from page 3 I don't think either of them have given me anything. It is what I was able to give that medium, and books have always been my life and actually so has cinema. Both of them have very important places in my life. So much of what I write has been because of the experiences that I also had as a young actor, whether it was seeing the basic inequalities between men and women, which I only realised much later in life. I feel that my skill set is more suited to the world of books because, I love the poetry, words, and I love language. It comes a little bit from, perhaps, my father (late veteran actor Rajesh Khanna), because I have a distinct memory when I was very young and I said, 'Will you pick me up from school?' And he said, 'Are you a pickup? I will fetch you from school.' That kind of just set my parameters of what language can do. And I grew up in a family of readers. My sister (Rinkle Khanna) reads more than I do. My late uncle read science fiction extensively, and science fiction has shaped my entire perception of life. So when people talk about religion or ideology or borders or race, I'm thinking in my head, I live in a galaxy where there are tentacled creatures who are breathing methane... These little diversities don't seem to matter. This morning, I was discussing the topics I plan to touch upon in my next column, and he told me, 'Mat karna... do not get into this issue'. Mat kar is basically his only and biggest contribution to my writing career (laughs). The most bizarre thing that I read was that I had some eye operation. I don't know why it was on some Wikipedia page for the longest time, and I've never had an eye operation. Bizarre. I would say it all works out in the end! Just keep doing what you're doing and finish the book you started when you were 18. I'm 52, and that one book I haven't been able to finish yet. I've tried three times in my life, I'm just unable to write that particular book. Maybe it's too close to home, so my emotions get in the way of transferring that onto the page. Oh! She was reading much more than I do now. I don't think I will. The camera actually has always terrified me. I am not really happy in the spotlight. It gives me a bit of a sunstroke, let's put it that way. I would say, Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove is a book that I love. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is something that I have read several times and I continue to read it . Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Haruki Murakami's Men Without Women; Octavia E Butler writes fantastic feminist science fiction; anything by Ursula Le Guin; short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri... F Scott Fitzgerald, PG Wodehouse... My god! I mean I am standing in front of my bookshelf, so tell me when to stop!...