Emma - Jane Austen

Unlike Sense and Sensibility, which centers heavily on sisterly solidarity and grief, Emma invites us into a different kind of closeness: an extended, often humorous look at a clever young woman who is utterly convinced of her own discernment, right up until the moment she realizes she understands almost nothing about human hearts—including her own.

The Charm of Misguided Cleverness

What makes Emma endlessly readable is its titular character. Emma Woodhouse is "handsome, clever, and rich," accustomed to having her own way and little disposed to think or reckon herself wrong. When she takes Harriet Smith under her wing, determined to orchestrate everyone's romantic destiny, we watch a masterclass in well-intentioned meddling.

Austen gives us a protagonist who is profoundly flawed yet deeply engaging. Emma’s mistakes aren't born of malice; they come from imagination run wild, class snobbery, and the sheer boredom of a comfortable life in Highbury. We see her misread Mr. Elton, misinterpret Frank Churchill, and judge Jane Fairfax with a sharp mixture of envy and prejudice.

Why We Keep Coming Back

I love how the novel handles growth. Austen doesn't punish Emma with a tragedy; instead, she subjects her to the quiet, burning agony of self-realization—most notably during the ill-fated picnic at Box Hill when Emma realizes she has been unkind to Miss Bates.

The questions the book leaves us with stay close to home:

• How often do our own biases shape how we view other people's motives?

• When does trying to "help" cross the line into arrogance?

• And how do we find humility before life forces it upon us?

Austen lets those questions live in polite conversations, awkward dinner parties, whispered secrets at assembly rooms, and small acts of emotional reckoning. Reading Emma is never just about finding out who marries whom; it is about watching a sharp mind slowly learn how to look past its own reflection.

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

There are books we finish and books we keep returning to. Sense and Sensibility is the latter for me. I have read it more than four times, end to end. I know the disappointments that await, the secrets people carry, and how the story resolves. Yet knowing has never been a reason to stop reading.

The Dashwood sisters lose their father, their home at Norland, and much of their financial security. What follows is a story of love and disappointment, but also of the uncomfortable business of depending on other people’s generosity. Austen understands how easily affection becomes conditional when money enters the conversation.

Elinor and Marianne meet this uncertainty differently. Elinor watches, considers, and contains herself. Marianne feels with an intensity that makes concealment seem almost dishonest. It is tempting to choose between them—to admire Elinor’s judgement or defend Marianne’s openness. But the more interesting question is what each way of living costs.

Elinor’s composure can make her suffering easy to overlook. Because she remains considerate, people continue to expect consideration from her. She must listen, keep confidences, and make room for others while carrying disappointments she can scarcely discuss. Austen gives us access to the effort behind that composure. Elinor feels deeply, and being sensible does very little to spare her pain.

Marianne, meanwhile, trusts the apparent agreement of tastes and feelings. Willoughby seems to understand everything that matters to her. Their connection is persuasive because she has so little reason, at first, to doubt its sincerity. His failure exposes the distance between sharing someone’s enthusiasms and accepting responsibility for their happiness.

Austen allows him enough feeling to make his conduct more troubling. He can regret what he has done. He can explain himself movingly. The harm remains.

And then there is Austen’s humour. John and Fanny Dashwood gradually reasoning themselves out of helping his sisters is a wonderfully uncomfortable scene. Every reduction in generosity arrives with a reassuring explanation. Their selfishness is recognisable because they take such care to make it sound reasonable.

I cannot read the ending without some uneasiness. Edward’s earlier choices cause Elinor considerable suffering. Marianne’s marriage to Colonel Brandon is given less space to develop than her attachment to Willoughby. The resolutions invite questions even as they offer relief. Perhaps that is part of what keeps the novel open to another reading.

At its heart, though, the relationship I care about most is the one between the sisters. They misunderstand each other, worry over each other, and gradually learn how much has gone unspoken. Marianne comes to recognise the depth of Elinor’s suffering; Elinor’s tenderness survives her frustration with Marianne. Their affection gives the book its emotional continuity.

Sense and Sensibility remains my favourite because its questions stay close to ordinary life. How much should we reveal? When should we trust our judgement? What do we owe the people who love us, especially when we are unhappy?

Austen lets those questions live in conversations, silences, foolish decisions, and small acts of care. I keep returning to the Dashwoods because there is still something in those familiar pages that asks me to pay closer attention.

The Essential Mahabharata - AR Krishnasastri - Translated by Arjun Bharadwaj and Hari Ravikumar

There are some books that you read for the story. And then there are books that come to you at a particular point in your life and mean much more than the story they tell.

The Essential Mahabharata was one such book for me.

This book is an English translation of A. R. Krishnashastri's Vachana Bharatha, a book I had read during my school days. So, when I picked this one up, the Mahabharata itself was certainly not new to me. 

There were no twists in the tale. 

And yet, this was probably one of the most meaningful books I read.

I read it soon after I had experienced a personal tragedy in my life. I was grieving, and grief had altered my sense of what was normal and real.

Strangely, it was this very familiar story that helped bring me back to my senses and to reality.

Perhaps it was because I already knew the Mahabharata well. Reading this rendition felt like returning to something familiar and reassuring. At several points, I found myself going back to the time when I had first read Vachana Bharatha as a school student.

There was comfort in that nostalgia.

But there was something more.

Somewhere along the way, while reading this book, I returned to God.

Grief can make us question many things we have always believed in. It did that to me too. But as I travelled once again with these familiar characters and their struggles, their losses, their questions and their faith, I slowly found my own faith returning.

It wasn't a sudden revelation. Nor did the book provide answers to everything I was struggling with. Rather, it reminded me of something I had perhaps lost sight of in my grief – that there are things in life beyond our understanding, that not everything that happens to us will have an explanation, and that faith sometimes begins where our ability to find answers ends.

The Mahabharata is, after all, a story filled with loss.

Its characters lose kingdoms, children, parents, siblings, teachers, friends and almost everything they once considered permanent. Even victory comes with enormous grief. Nobody really emerges from the Mahabharata untouched by loss.

And yet, life continues.

People grieve. They question. They become angry. They struggle with what has happened to them. And eventually, they find a way to accept reality and move forward.

Reading that while dealing with my own grief had an impact on me that I probably would not have experienced had I read the this book at a different point in my life.

And somewhere through that reading, I found myself returning to the central question of the Mahabharata:

What is Dharma?

When you read the Mahabharata when you are young, you tend to remember the story – the Pandavas and Kauravas, Draupadi, Bhishma, Karna, Krishna, the game of dice, the exile and, eventually, Kurukshetra.

When you return to it much later in life, Dharma takes on a different meaning.

What is the right thing to do when life doesn't unfold the way you expected?

How do you accept something you cannot change?

How do you continue to fulfil your responsibilities when you are carrying grief?

And how do you find your way back to faith?

The Mahabharata has never allowed Dharma to be simple.

What is right for one person may conflict with the duty of another. A promise made with the best of intentions can have terrible consequences. A person we consider righteous can make questionable choices, while someone seemingly on the wrong side can demonstrate extraordinary loyalty and generosity.

Sometimes there simply isn't a choice that is completely right.

Reading The Essential Mahabharata did not change my understanding of Dharma. Instead, it reinforced many of my older beliefs about what defines Dharma.

Perhaps Dharma is not always about finding the perfect answer. Sometimes it is about accepting the reality in front of us, doing what needs to be done, and continuing the journey.

And perhaps faith is not about understanding why everything happens. It is about trusting God even when we don't understand.

Those thoughts meant a lot more to me this time. 

The story hadn't changed. I had.

This time, the Mahabharata did much more than tell me a story I knew. It helped me cope with grief. It brought me to reality. It made me think again about Dharma.

And most importantly, it brought me back to God.

For that, The Essential Mahabharata will always remain a very special book for me.

The Secret of Secrets - Dan Brown

It has been a while since I read a Dan Brown book, and The Secret of Secrets reminded me why I enjoy his books so much.

Robert Langdon is back, and this time the story takes us to Prague, where he is accompanying Katherine Solomon. Katherine is about to present research that could fundamentally change the way we understand human consciousness. And, as you would expect in a Dan Brown novel, things don't quite go according to plan.

What follows is the familiar Dan Brown combination of science, history, mystery, secret organisations, codes, symbols and a race against time. But what made this book particularly interesting to me was the subject at the centre of it all – consciousness.

Can consciousness exist independently of our physical body?

What happens to consciousness when the body dies?

Can our consciousness have a non-local experience – something that cannot be explained by the physical location of our brain or body?

These are questions that have fascinated people for centuries, but they also resonate with something I personally believe in – that there is an afterlife and that when consciousness leaves the body, it can have a non-local experience.

So, unlike some of Dan Brown's earlier books where I was mainly following Langdon through the mystery, in this book I found myself connecting with the underlying idea as well.

And that made the book a very enjoyable read for me. I enjoyed practically every page.

Of course, this is still Dan Brown, so philosophical questions alone aren't enough. There has to be a conspiracy somewhere!

One particular construct in the story surprised me – the idea of taking this understanding of consciousness and turning it into a technology that could potentially be used to spy on enemy nations.

I certainly didn't expect the story to go in that direction.

At first, the jump from consciousness and the afterlife to espionage sounds rather far-fetched. But within the world Dan Brown creates, the storyline worked surprisingly well for me. He manages to take an idea that is philosophical, spiritual and scientific and ask a very different question:

What if someone discovered that it could actually be weaponised?

That twist adds another dimension to the book. A discovery about the nature of human existence would not remain merely an academic or spiritual discovery. Governments, intelligence agencies and powerful organisations would immediately start thinking about what else it could be used for.

And perhaps that is not so far-fetched after all!

Dan Brown's books have always lived somewhere at the intersection of fact, speculation and imagination. You know while reading them that you shouldn't necessarily accept everything as fact, but he gives you just enough history and science to make you wonder, "What if?"

The Secret of Secrets did that for me.

It gave me the usual Robert Langdon adventure that I expected, but it also dealt with a subject that I already find fascinating. More importantly, it left me thinking about consciousness, death and what might exist beyond our physical bodies even after I had finished the book.

And that, for me, is what makes a good Dan Brown novel.

A thoroughly enjoyable read – and one that resonated with me at a very personal level.

The Essential Ramayana — by Arjun Bharadwaj

 

I read The Essential Ramayana by Arjun Bharadwaj during the time of Diwali, which made the experience even more meaningful and spiritually enriching. The book itself is a concise and accessible retelling of the great epic Ramayana, originally composed by the sage Valmiki. Bharadwaj presents the story in simple and clear prose while preserving the essence of the original narrative. The book captures the important events of the epic—Prince Rama’s exile, the devotion of Sita and Lakshmana, the unwavering loyalty of Hanuman, and the battle against Ravana—while keeping the storytelling engaging and easy to follow.

Reading this book during Diwali felt especially auspicious because the festival itself commemorates the triumphant return of Rama to Ayodhya after fourteen years of exile and after defeating Ravana. Diwali symbolizes the victory of light over darkness and righteousness over evil, themes that are central to the Ramayana. As I progressed through the book during the festive days filled with lamps, prayers, and celebration, the story felt more alive and deeply connected to the spirit of the festival. It felt like a blessing to revisit the journey of Rama at a time when millions of people celebrate his return and the restoration of dharma.

The book succeeds in making the epic approachable for modern readers while maintaining respect for the traditional narrative. Bharadwaj avoids unnecessary reinterpretations and instead focuses on presenting the story in a straightforward manner. While the prose format does not capture the full poetic beauty of the original Sanskrit verses, it allows readers to understand the story clearly and appreciate its moral and cultural significance.

Overall, reading The Essential Ramayana during Diwali made the experience more than just reading a book—it became a reflective and spiritual journey. The story of Rama’s courage, righteousness, and devotion resonated deeply with the meaning of the festival. It felt like a wonderful way to connect with the tradition behind Diwali and to remember why the return of Rama to Ayodhya continues to be celebrated as a symbol of hope, virtue, and the triumph of good over evil. ✨🪔