I enjoy reading quite a lot—sometimes as much as ten hours a day, though on average about eight. Reading has become my primary pastime—not as a leisure activity, but as a discipline. I read good books, chosen carefully, ordered online and added to a personal library built slowly and meticulously over the past fifty years. Every book is wrapped in a transparent plastic cover to protect it from dust and decay. I write in the margins, underline passages and affix slips of paper with tape. Books, for me, are not objects to be preserved in pristine condition; they are working instruments. I converse with them.

After publishing thirty-five books, I have decided not to write any more in that form. The inspiration came from Shakespeare, who wrote nothing in his last six years. However, I continue to write blogs—shorter, more flexible, and closer to thought in motion. Since May 2019, these blogs have been curated by Tanya Seth-Reddy. There are now more than 160 of them, each roughly a thousand words, recording observations, reflections, and, most importantly, stories of extraordinary people I have encountered. Sakal Publications published a book titled Spectrum, drawn from 150 of these blogs, that presents both my worldview and my writing style.

According to an AI analysis of my blogs, my writing falls within the stream-of-consciousness tradition pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I accept that description with some hesitation, because style is not something one consciously adopts. It emerges from long exposure, absorption and imitation—often unconsciously. On my website, I list ten books that shaped my thinking and explain how each influenced me at a particular stage of life. I neither inherited writing nor was educated in literature, nor learned to write through workshops or manuals. I learned to write by reading.

Among all writers, V. S. Naipaul has influenced me most—his moral seriousness, his clarity and his refusal to sentimentalise. Among living authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017, has been a profound teacher. Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun confront the future not with spectacle, but with restraint, presenting a quiet humanity staring down an ethically diminished world. Margaret Atwood, especially through her MaddAddam trilogy, is another great teacher. She does not predict the future; she extrapolates from the present. These writers show what it means to think through fiction.

Here, I want to explain precisely what I mean by learning to write by reading, using Oryx and Crake—the first book I read in 2026—as an example.

In Oryx and Crake, Oryx is presented less as an animal than as a sound—a mantra severed from its original referent. The word survives, but its source, the antelope, has faded away. In this detachment lies Atwood’s quiet warning: meanings once rooted in lived reality are now abstracted, commodified, and hollowed out. Oryx’s own life mirrors this condition. She is shaped by forces she neither names nor controls, carried along by systems that preserve surface appearances while draining experience of depth.

Crake, by contrast, takes his name from a marshland bird that feeds in shallow waters, surviving on insects and molluscs. It is a creature adapted to liminal terrain—neither land nor water, neither depth nor stability. Atwood invokes this image deliberately. The world of Oryx and Crake resembles a vast marshland: ethically shallow, ecologically fragile and technologically saturated. In this landscape, technology does not cultivate or sustain; it forages. It feeds on natural resources, on bodies, on attention, and ultimately, on the human mind itself. Together, Oryx and Crake name a present in which words drift free of meaning and intelligence thrives in shallow ground—efficient, adaptive and extractive, yet incapable of reverence or restraint.

Atwood sets her novel around 2050, after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. The story is told through a man who survives and lives alone on an island with bioengineered humanoids. Atwood moves skilfully back and forth between the post-apocalyptic present—where the hero struggles to survive—and the pre-apocalyptic past of 2030, reconstructed through memory. This non-linear structure gradually reveals how the world fell apart, creating suspense while allowing the reader to learn inductively, rather than be told.

Atwood’s world-building is vivid and unsettling because it feels familiar. The sterile, high-tech corporate compounds are sharply contrasted with the chaotic and violent ‘pleeblands’, where the poor (plebeians) live. In the ‘Blood and Roses’ game, characters trade human achievements in art and music against histories of war and atrocity, reducing both to points. Civilisation itself becomes a scoreboard.

Memory, for Atwood, is not merely a narrative device but a central theme. The hero’s constant return to the past is both a coping mechanism and a burden. He is deeply flawed—an ‘intimate outsider’ who witnesses the disaster partly through his own complicity. This moral proximity is crucial. The reader identifies with him not because he is heroic, but because he is recognisably human. 

Who is not like this helpless hero archetype of modern times? In our inability to effect change, embedded in our cowardice, we are later haunted by the guilt of a co-conspirator. But when was it ever different? Did not Bhishma watch in silence as Draupadi was subjected to an attempt at disrobing? Did he not lie upon a bed of arrows, delaying his death while reflecting and lamenting? Had he not awaited the auspicious phase of the Sun?

Is Atwood pointing out the same trajectory for the thoughtful people of the world? Atwood insists that she writes speculative fiction, not science fiction. Nothing in Oryx and Crake depends on impossible technology. The question she asks is not ‘can we do this?’, but ‘will we?’ What happens when scientific capability outruns ethical restraint? The novel is a warning, but it is also a compelling story—addictive, unsettling and meticulously constructed.

What I learned most from Oryx and Crake is the power of wordplay. Atwood’s stunning neologisms and puns expose the devaluation of language in a consumer-driven, high-tech world. Brand names do the work of philosophy. ‘NooSkin’ suggests renewal while concealing artificiality. ‘HelthWyzer’ masks corporate manipulation beneath the guise of managerial wisdom. The ‘BlyssPluss’ pill promises pleasure and enhancement while carrying a hidden plague. The secure facility where the new world is created is called ‘Paradice’—a play on paradise and dice—signalling that this supposedly perfect world is built on a reckless gamble.

Reading teaches that writing is not merely a vehicle for story, but a moral instrument. Language does not arrive empty; it carries histories, hierarchies, silences and choices. Ethics are embedded not only in what is said, but also in how patiently, honestly and sparingly it is said. A writer who reads learns that meaning is shaped as much by what comes first and what comes later as by the sentences in between.

Perhaps most powerfully, reading teaches the value of restraint. Consider, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. The entire story deals with the dilemma of having an unwanted baby, but the word ’abortion’ is not used. The moral weight of the story lies entirely in the unsaid—in pauses, repetitions and evasions. The couple’s inability to name the problem mirrors their inability to face it honestly. Excess explanation would have weakened the story. 

From such works, a writer learns that excess often betrays insecurity, while restraint signals trust—trust in language, in the reader, and in truth itself. Reading teaches that silence can accuse, simplicity can confer dignity, and structure can disclose what argument struggles to prove. When one reads deeply and attentively over many years, rhythms begin to seep in—along with moral posture, pauses, and an instinct for what must be left unsaid. This is not a shortcut but a discipline that demands time, patience and practice. And then, almost quietly, writing arrives with a revelation: the sentences were already there, waiting to be recognised. Perhaps that is why my future blogs may read less like posts and more like small, self-contained books.

 Please keep reading—and do share your thoughts in the comments.