Books for Personality Development

I became an inadvertent audience to a state-of-the-art (modern :-)) conversation in a book shop, recently. Presenting it here….

 

2 guys enter the bookshop. Both of them are talking at the top of their voices and couldn’t perhaps care less about disturbing others in the bookshop.

Let’s call them ‘Reader’ and ‘Recommender’.

 

Reader goes around looking for books and picks up a few in about a minute’s time and puts it on the desk at the counter. One of the books is a popular book by an Indian author doing its rounds in the books shops of late.

 

Recommender sees the book and says “Hey, don’t tell me you read XYZ (name of the author goes here)! What XYZ? What kind of books are you reading man?” He goes on to put down the book and the author some more. (Yours truly hasn’t read this particular book but was bothered about someone demeaning a book and its author probably because it had the written by a person from the speaker’s own country! Why?...I thought…why do we adopt this kind of an irrational and unpatriotic approach and praise the foreign and belittle the native?) Anyways, the conversation went on….

 

Recommender continued “You got to read books that develop your personality, man. I know you don’t have a personality. Let me help you build one. Let me recommend books for you. Pick up ‘heavy’ books. Take the classics.”  

 

Reader says “What kind of books?”

 

Recommender names some books here…and says “You should sport books that people think are cool. They should be intended to ‘reflect’ your personality whether you read them or not. I want books that I don’t want to read. A coffee table book that I can let people see and think “what a cool guy that must be…reading that book”.

 

So, that’s what Mr.Recommender meant by “Personality Development”! Funny but sad, eh??