New Delhi, July 5 -- I first read Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal 25 years ago as a college student, longing for a pick-me-up while I was struggling to write an essay on the 18th-century poet, John Dryden. It was just the antidote I needed against the endless rhyming couplets and iambic pentameters, the roll call of fops and dandies, that were fogging up my brain.

Not quite an avid reader of thrillers then or now, I was surprised to find myself not only hooked to the pace of the action but also rooting for the hero, an unnamed assassin who goes only by the moniker of " the Jackal." I wanted him to succeed in his mission to kill the controversial and divisive French President, Charles de Gaulle. Only much later did I realise tha...