Literary Biography

Like that proverbial stone, I've been rolling over all these years, gathering little moss, but in the wake, I do have gathered some shine in a few places. That serves my survival kit. Through the past three decades, I’ve worked across corporate strategy, international marketing, branding, credentialing, policy drafting, and consulting, and even taught business strategy for a while - often in environments where clarity mattered more than elegance, and decisions had consequences beyond the page. I’ve written copy, designed frameworks, advised institutions, and for whatever it's worth, helped organizations think through moments of change.

I followed books everywhere - not as a hobby, but for infrastructure. Like an unsure Russian mastiff. Soon, reading was following me. Like a loyal Indian hound.

It showed up in flight lounges and courtrooms, in classrooms and conference halls, in moments of professional momentum and periods of personal unravelling. I’ve seen what reading does when time is scarce, attention is fractured, and stakes are real. I’ve also seen how poorly most advice about reading land, barely surviving those conditions.

That tension - between how reading is talked about and how it actually works in lived life - is where this book was born.

Truth be told, I never had that inspiration to approach reading as a moral act, a cultural badge, or a productivity hack. Good for me, because I anyways distrust all three.

I am drawn instead to stuff more mechanistic - structure, heuristics, and working models - to questions like:

What does reading books do to attention?
How does it shape judgment over time?
Why does it fail so often under pressure?
And what allows it to return?

My emotional bandwidth is narrow by design. I respond to humor, to anger when something is broken or dishonest, and to compassion when effort goes unseen. Everything else feels like garnish. That sensibility - or lack of it - combined with a lifelong instinct for building rubrics and frameworks - perhaps shaped The Art of the Read into what it is: reflective but unsentimental, personal but non-indulgent, rigorous without posturing.

This is not a book written from a tower. It is written from the middle of things, with chaos whiffing and sniffing around, sometimes even lashing.

Alongside this book, I write long-form essays on thinking, society, and systems. I’ve been a syndicated blogger with The Times of India, where I’ve explored politics, culture, and public life, taken sides, but could never chase outrage or consensus successfully. I’ve also written extensively for professional and institutional audiences, including a multi-volume series on the global BPO industry.

These bodies of work may look unrelated, but they aren’t. I would like to believe they share a single concern: how people think under constraint - and what helps them do it better, to solve problems - common, or alien.

Over time, patterns begin betraying preferences.

I’ve spent much of my life bonding with books, brands, bands, brews, bails and their beats. Not as much collecting them, as tinkering with them just for their heck, sometimes testing how they hold under pressure, but mostly, trying to force that haughty square peg in a poor round hole. That tends to rip them off their blahs and blubber, leaving their bones, their ideas, their systems behind with me.

It's brutal for many, but compression for me. Structure. The ability of a sentence, a concept, or a framework to carry weight without noise. The jewelry store isn't for me. Perhaps because I know the stories behind the brands too close.

This orientation shapes everything I write. It explains why I’m drawn to thinkers who clarify rather than decorate, to arguments that withstand repetition, and to forms that reveal their strength quietly over time. That's why I hate lines like life kills, death saves. It also explains why The Art of the Read avoids instruction and persuasion, and instead works toward steadier judgment.

Though I've written five of them, this one's the most personal book I’ve done, not because it exposes a life, but because it reflects how I trust ideas to work - slowly, structurally, and without spectacle.

If the book changes how you sit with words, arguments, or attention itself, it has done what it was meant to do.

The rest does not belong on the page.