Pages from others' lives

If there is one book for which Saugata Gupta, CEO of domestic business for Marico is desperately waiting for, it is K V Kamath's autobiography.

For Gupta, Kamath has been a great inspiration and his life would, thus, make for a great read. Immensely fond of autobiographies, he swears by Jack Welch's works, especially Winning and Straight from the Gut, which incidentally is also the best book he's ever laid eyes on.

His attraction to autobiographies stems from the fact that he finds a "lot of learning and inspiration from these books". Among the Indian authors, he likes to turn to Upamanyu Chatterjee and Suketu Mehta for their sheer ability to weave a "high degree of relatability" into their writing.

Not much of an airport bookshop browser, Gupta usually boards a flight armed with a set of articles and books that keep him company through his journey. His interest in books is shared in a magnified magnitude by that of his wife's, which is why Gupta never has a clue of the amount of money he spends on books. 
 

Books and the man - XIX
A weekly series on books and authors people read
Best-ever read	Straight from the Gut
Most influenced by	Straight from the Gut and Winning
Could never read	Management books
Favourite genre	Autobiographies and biographies
Favourite reading spot	The beach
My life as a book	Winning

"My wife is a voracious reader and buyer and she picks up books almost every week," he explains. Apart from buying is own, he also borrows books from his boss and confesses that there is a huge backlog of books waiting to be read.

"I am surviving on book extracts compiled by my boss just to speed things up," he says.

Though most of his reading happens on flights and at airport lounges, Gupta reads best when he's sprawled on a lounge chair at a beach.

Of course, he does manage to turn a few pages in the loo... but those would have to be pages from comics and tabloids purely because "I'm not very good at multitasking".