Kathmandu, Nov. 30 -- I have been a book person all my life. If I try finding the genesis of reading, the first impetus, I think it was in high school when I accidentally stumbled onto one of those Chetan Bhagat books and started feeding myself on its pages. It was only after a year or two, I believe I developed some kind of 'literary taste' and grew out of cheap potboilers. I cannot tell you what an exciting adventure it was in the beginning-during lonesome nights, pulling books from the rickety shelf, scanning the pages, reading a line over and over again until its meaning got soaked into my bones. My two years of high school were filled with the early memories of reading: cheap commercial trash and mushy poems about love and loss.

It ...