Keeping it real

Even with his insatiable appetite for reading, Santosh Desai gives the genre of fiction a royal ignore.

By his own admission, Santosh Desai, managing director and CEO of Future Brands "used to be a voracious reader but now only pretends to be one".

For someone who's constantly adding to his burgeoning book collection, Desai will never be caught reading a management bible or a work of fiction for that matter. Instead, everything a sociology student hates, Desai adores.

Deploring the lack of intelligent business writing, he rejects management tomes as "utterly boring and elementary".

Give him works on contemporary Indian culture, interesting biographies, religion, evolutionary biology, anthropology, cultural history, sociology or travel and he is happy to lap it up.

Obsessed with the question, "Why we are the way we are?" the veritable bookworm picks up books that help him understand the human psyche. "I find fiction tiring as you have to keep admiring the invented worlds of novelists," he says.

So, keeping it real is big with Desai when it comes to his reading habits. He counts Mythologies by Roland Barthes as his initiation into a whole new world of literature. And now that the man has made his way into this exciting world, he's not in a hurry to leave.

Perpetually looking for new works explaining the human society and psyche, he recounts Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins and Claude Levi-Strauss, besides Barthes, among his favourites.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Desai also admires the works of Ashish Nandy and Sudhir Kakar along with Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani. The travel writings of VS Naipaul, William Dalrymple and James Cameron are add-ons... little wonder then that he refuses to name a favourite author.