Footnotes to a Personal History

Five Books That Shaped Me

Some books you forget within days. Others leave marks you only notice years later. And a rare few become footnotes to your personal history. They shape how you see, how you choose, how you think. Without them, it would be impossible to fully decode the person you are.

This is about five such books for me.

The Gateway Drug – Ponniyin Selvan

Kalki Krishnamoorthy, 1957

I didn’t become a reader until I was nearly 15. Books were always around the house, but never really mine. Then one bored afternoon, with board exams looming, I picked up Ponniyin Selvan a seven-book set that had been sitting untouched at home for years. It was a random decision. One that quietly changed the course of my personal history.

The very first scene - the vivid image of Vandiyathevan riding by a lake, with the vast Chozha kingdom looming around him and political tension thick in the air had hooked me instantly. What followed was a breathtaking mix of suspense, grandeur, betrayal, and wit. I was transported a thousand years back.

Each page drew me deeper into secret hallways whispered with danger, spies watching from the shadows of Kadambur Palace, messages passed in code. There were ocean-crossing adventures, shifting alliances, and a quiet undercurrent of cultural pride and political justice. I saw the world through the eyes of messengers, soldiers, rebels, queens. The scale was epic, but the feeling was deeply intimate.

I couldn’t put it down. Even with board exams around the corner, I read through the nights. All seven volumes, over 2000 pages, finished in less than a week. I was stunned that a book could do this make the real world disappear, and build a living, breathing one inside your head.

That week lit a fire. I wanted more. I wanted thrill, pace, scale. I dove into popular fiction Dan Brown, Mario Puzo, Archer, Sandilyan, Sujatha. Anything that could grip me, entertain me, keep me turning the page. That hunger never really left.

Ponniyin Selvan didn’t just make me a reader. It made me a lifelong searcher for great stories to keep me entertained, and maybe, to keep me young.

The Inward Journey – The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy, 1997

As I was chasing thrill in books, I also realized I was beginning to crave more than just pace. The kindling of the senses wasn’t just about plot anymore. I wanted something deeper, though I didn’t know where to start.

Like most of us who grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had heard about Arundhati Roy winning the Booker. So I picked up The God of Small Things, not fully knowing what I was getting into.

The first chapter told me everything had changed. The rhythm of reading felt different. The words didn’t flow like a stream they just lay there quietly, like a pond. Waiting for you to slow down. Dip in and linger.

There’s a moment early in the book where Roy describes the setting, the heat, the river, the overripe fruits, the heavy monsoon air, the stillness of the house and I remember just stopping to absorb it. I had never read prose like that before. It wasn’t trying to carry you away. It was asking you to stay. The beauty was lyrical, but it also had weight and pain.

The book took me time. I now realise I was probably too young then to fully grasp its cultural and political layers. But I still felt something. Especially the last chapter when Ammu and Velutha meet one final time. There was a kind of silence in those pages, a fragile intensity I didn’t know books could hold.

I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain it. But I knew this feeling was something rare.

The plot didn’t move in a straight line. It looped. It circled. It lingered. It didn’t race it asked you to sit still and quiet. And like any powerful literary fiction, it opened something in me. A deeper door. One I hadn’t known was waiting to be unlocked.

After this, the way I read changed completely.

The Book That Foretold – Urupasi

S. Ramakrishnan, 2006

My search for meaning in my early twenties led me to S. Ramakrishnan a towering figure in modern Tamil literature. By then, I had begun reading widely across Tamil and English. From Dostoevsky to Kee.Raa, my shelves were filling up fast. But if I had to name one book that still sits somewhere in my spine, quietly lodged - it would be Urupasi.

It’s a slim book. Almost a novella. The story of Sampath, a man in his late 30s who’s failed in life, misunderstood, poor and mostly alone. A man whose “chronic hunger” is not just for food, but for dignity, for meaning.

I read it during my summer break, right after cracking my first job interview. I had just been placed in a top MNC. This was the mid-2000s, and that meant you were sorted. Or at least, you thought you were.

But Urupasi threw me off. The narrative moved through the fragmented memories of Sampath’s friends. None of them saw him fully. Each carried a version. And piece by piece, their stories revealed a man slowly erased by life. By poverty. By loneliness. By the quiet ache of being unwanted.

I had never read anything that bleak, that close-up.

It disturbed me.

I was surrounded by friends full of plans, ambition, hope and laughter. But the question stuck: Will I end up having friends who turn out like Sampath? Or worse - will it be me?

That question lingered. And over the years, I’ve watched parts of it come true. Not for me, but for many people around me. Especially a close friend who passed away recently after years of silent struggle.

Urupasi had prepared me in a way I didn’t understand back then. It gave me the vocabulary for grief before I ever needed it. And in what should have been a season of celebration, it grounded me in a kind of empathy I might have never otherwise accessed and showed me me a truth too early.

The Book That Gave Me a Mirror – The Labyrinth of Solitude

Octavio Paz, 1950

As I neared my 30s, my reading shifted again. Fiction had given me thrill, and depth, but now I wanted clarity. I didn’t just want to feel the world. I wanted to understand it.

The book that marked that turn was The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz.

A Mexican writer reflecting on life, solitude, rebellion, and identity in the Mexican psyche but so much of it felt eerily close to home. The way Paz dissected behaviour, gave meaning to the things we do without thinking on customs, rituals, curse words and silences made me see people and patterns differently. It gave language to instincts I hadn’t yet articulated.

The chapter that first hit me was the one on the Pachuco a countercultural movement among Mexican-American youth. Paz doesn’t glorify them or vilify them, just he observes them. Paz writes how the Pachuco, by being an outsider, still craves recognition. That sometimes, by being a rebel, we plead with society to give us at least the antagonist’s role, because the protagonist roles are already taken.

That thought stayed with me. And at many times explained many behaviors, including my own.

The rest of the book opened even more doors. The chapter on language. On how women are central to our abuses. On masks. On solitude. I had never seen culture, identity, and politics unpacked with such calm precision.

And from there, I didn’t look back. I began moving toward non-fiction. First slowly, then deliberately and then fully. I wanted to decipher structures of society, of history, even of fiction itself.

The Book That Shook Perspectives – Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond, 1997

You have these moments of quiet after reading something profound, where the world stops for a bit. You ruminate. That happened to me almost every other chapter with this book.

What does a sweeping account of human evolution, geography, and biology teach you about your own privilege? About the myth of merit? About justice? For many, this is a book about macro history. But for me, it became a thought portal into my own political beliefs.

The question that stays with me asked by a Guinean labourer to Jared Diamond was:

“Why do you white men have so much cargo, and we black men have so little?”

That question isn’t just for Europeans. It’s aimed at all of us. It forces you to confront how your birth, geography, and circumstance shape your outcomes.I remembered my own childhood playing in the sun while farm labourers toiled just metres away. What made their summer so different from mine? What privilege allowed me to play while they worked? It made me realize that what we often call “success” or “merit” or even “wealth” is built on invisible scaffolding - centuries of accumulated advantage or inherited deprivation.

This was my first serious exercise in political thought. A moment where I began asking: where do I stand in the proverbial French Assembly of 1789? To the right or to the left? What does justice mean, not in theory, but in design?

Sure, the book has its critics, and it sparked plenty of academic discussion. But books are magical things. Some dissolve quietly into you. Others ignite something. Guns, Germs, and Steel did the latter. It set fire to old assumptions and lit the path to a deeper, more structured political curiosity. The booked solidified the political beliefs which were already forming inside me and gave me a new lens to look at the world.

A Life in Chapters

Looking back, my reading has mirrored the arc of growing up.

In my teens, it was all about popular fiction about stories that thrilled, entertained, and kept me up at night. My twenties brought a shift toward literary fiction, slower, introspective, emotionally layered. And in my thirties, I found myself drawn toward non-fiction, the books that gave structure to the chaos, offered frameworks to understand power, history, identity, and even explained why Sampath, Velutha, Ammu, and even I lived the way we did.

But this isn’t a full stop to the genres. I still enjoy being entertained by a sharp crime novel, a well-built fantasy, or an imaginative sci-fi world. I still get quieted by a work of fiction that stays with me longer than it should. And I keep reaching for that next non-fiction book for meaning.

Because in the end, I would’ve been a different person if not for these books.

Maybe there’s another version of me somewhere in the multiverse, who didn’t pick up that book on a bored afternoon. Maybe he’s kinder, simpler and less complicated. Or maybe he’s more lost, more uninformed, a worse human in ways I’ll never know.

I have no idea who he became.

But this is who I am.

And these are the books that shaped me.

Memories of Madurai

I still remember my first week at college, fresh out of Madurai and stepping into a prestigious campus in Coimbatore. I arrived feeling confident in what I considered my smartest attire which defined high-fashion in Madurai. My signature look: a t-shirt layered beneath an open shirt, first two buttons deliberately left undone, a style that commanded respect back home – the classic "gethu style". For several days, I proudly wore this uniform of southern Tamil Nadu identity until a classmate's casual remark shattered my confidence. "Enna madurai ah?" they asked with a subtle, dismissive smile. In that moment, I realized my hometown fashion statement read very differently here. "Madurai"was shorthand for unpolished, rustic, somewhat outdated. In the years that followed, I tried earnestly to shed my Madurai skin, adapting to become a proper Coimbatorean, then tried many other identities a Chennaite, a part-Bangalorean, and even a wannabe New Yorker for a few years. Yet despite all my efforts at transformation, I've never fully erased the madurai-kaaran within me. The essence of Madurai follows me like an invisible thread, connecting who I was to who I've become, no matter how far I travel from those once familiar streets.

Just as my 'gethu style' marked me as an outsider in Coimbatore, my Madurai Tamil had a way of emerging in everyday conversations. Even my maternal family, settled in the more refined Coimbatore, would burst into laughter at my distinctive "Anneee" or the way I'd say "Ankittu/Inkittu/varaainga." "Say those Madurai words again," they'd urge and howl with laughter, finding entertainment in expressions that were simply everyday language back home. The years spent moving between cities gradually neutralized my accent, yet it never fully disappeared. When meeting friends or talking to fellow citizens of the old city and in moments of road rage or sudden anger, my neutrality shatters, and pure, unfiltered Madurai Tamil erupts including the colorful profanities unique to our city's streets, surprising even me.

But somehow I’ve realized the food never changed. Going with Appa on his old Kinetic Honda to different food joints introduced me to what I consider the national dish of Madurai - the Parotta (spelt Brotta). Not the dignified, whole wheat paratha of the north with its simple folds, but the extravagantly layered and flamboyant Madurai parotta. Where the paratha whispers, our parotta roars. Even now, my go-to order remains parotta, and my ritual never varies: tapping gently until the layers loosen, then tearing it apart to dip into that rich, aromatic salna, adding chicken in the middle and gently gliding it into the mouth - absolute heaven. You can't take the parotta out of someone from Madurai. Parotta wasn't mainstreamed until the late 2000s, and I've noticed the deep love for it remains primarily a South Tamil Nadu phenomenon. For folks raised in Chennai, Coimbatore, and other parts of the Tamil diaspora, it's just a dish. But for those of us from Madurai, it's nothing less than an emotion - each bite a direct connection to those midnight shops across the sleepless city of Madurai.

They say people in Madurai will sacrifice anything for someone they've recently met, a generosity of spirit that outsiders often mistake for naivety. Madurai was a high trust society and I grew up without realizing it was distinctive. In Madurai, you were ready to go the extra mile for someone because you believed they would do the same for you. Trust wasn't earned incrementally; it was the default starting position. I didn't recognize this trait until I discovered the world often operates on different principles. Many of my missteps esp. in business stemmed from this ingrained habit of leading with trust. The Madurai way of forming bonds becomes your greatest strength and vulnerability. When we built our company years later, we instinctively established trust and transparency as foundational tenets. It felt natural that my co-founders came from the same south TN mileu and they understood this unspoken approach to human connection. What surprised me was how this Madurai-born philosophy of default trust created a rare culture of belonging. Years later, former employees still tell me their best professional days were working with us. Perhaps that's the ultimate vindication of the Madurai approach to relationships

Also, the essence of Madurai I carry isn't what the world usually celebrates as cosmopolitan. It embodied something more organic, not the activist, modernist vision of diversity, but a natural coexistence where differences blend into the everyday fabric of life. I remember my childhood colony being home to people of various religions, castes, classes and language backgrounds where we as kids and our parents naturally formed friendships across different streets and homes. The street opposite our house had an orthodox Hindu home flanked on each side by Muslim and Christian families, though it had other names we used to call it the India Street. Our Muslim friends were all “mapillais”, and the neighborhood mosque served as our reliable alarm clock. We weren't taught constitutional lessons on secularism, we were just living it daily. When I notice in many other cities the ghettoization of communities based on religion, I'm struck by how different Madurai was, people simply building their homes next to strangers who eventually became friends for a lifetime. The situation outside the city might have been different, but growing up within Madurai itself gave you a larger, more accepting heart. This is perhaps why divisive political forces that succeed elsewhere never gain much traction in Madurai, you simply can't make the average person from Madurai hate his neighbor that easily. Those human bonds and lessons forged through shared daily life prove remarkably resilient.

Now, it's been more than two decades since I left my childhood home and more than a decade since we had to sell our house and kind of parted ways with what anchored us to the city. Madurai wasn't even a city that my mom or dad grew up in, it was just a place where they found jobs in their 30s and raised the two of us. I don't see myself going back or another generation of mine calling Madurai their home. When I asked my wife recently if she sees any Madurai traits in me, she simply said, "That's the only thing I see in you." Perhaps that's the truest reflection of who I am. In the food I eat, the language I speak, in the things I value in people, and in celebrating the shared humanity around me - I will probably be forever shaped by my memories of Madurai.

The Undying Fire of an Accidental Entrepreneur

I've come to realize there are two types of entrepreneurs. First, there's the classical ones; left-brained, hawkish business-builders, naturally drawn to entrepreneurship as a career. Many often raised in families where business was a way of life. They grew up breathing this stuff. Then there's us, the accidental entrepreneurs. Right-brained, gut-driven, heart-led builders who stumbled into this world without a roadmap. No one groomed us for this; we just found ourselves here because we couldn't stop chasing ideas that wouldn't leave us alone.

Sure, both types hustle in the same world, but for us accidentals, it's different. We're here for the freedom to bring our ideas to life, the exhilaration of solving problems that fascinate us, and yes, the sweet relief of not having someone else dictate our days. This journey isn't just about a grand exit strategy. It's about our way of putting a dent in the world however small it might be, and making the world a personal canvas to paint on.

This is where I found myself, never planning to be here but couldn't ignore that pull to create something from nothing. And what I've learned along the way is that the entrepreneurial fire burns hottest when you're building something because you’ve got to build it, not just because it might make you rich.

The Unexpected Path

I had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. Born to salaried class parents in the 90s, running a business was something that certain families did. In India then, entrepreneurship seemed to follow bloodlines. The path laid out to me was simple: study hard, get a stable job, climb the corporate ladder.

In college I loved that intersection where technology could meet unbridled creativity, those moments when code could build something beautiful or solve real problems. But ultimately, I found that secure job at an MNC, wrote boring code, managed teams, collected my paycheck and walked the expected path.

Then came the internet boom, slowly democratizing entrepreneurship, breaking down old barriers. In the early 2010s while a revolution was brewing elsewhere in the world, startups were still a novel concept in India. But when I found an opportunity to work for one, I realized it was an accident bound to happen. Something ignited inside me - a restlessness, a curiosity, a hunger to create. I risked my secure job and plunged right in. What followed became the defining adventure of my life.

The Rollercoaster Years

I found myself in NYC, building products in the capital of the world. The lows were dramatic. I was part of a product launch at Disrupt TechCrunch which was almost laughed off stage. The drive back through the streets of NYC afterward was the longest I've ever experienced, with every minute stretching into eternity. Worked for months without making a salary. We faced directionless bankruptcy before having to rebuild the company from scratch.

But the highs were equally intoxicating. The bootstrapped venture I was part of had a multi-million dollar exit and I made quite a bit more money in my 20s than my peers. I lived and built from the capital of the world. I partied in the Bahamas, traveled only business class (sometimes even first), and tasted success.

It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. And somewhere along the way, I realized I already had great stories to tell my grandkids someday which honestly to me mattered more than the money I earned.

The Pivot and Persistence

Back in India, I embarked on a journey with friends turned comrades that unexpectedly led me to building a tech company with over 350 employees. Another accident. I never planned to employ hundreds or build something at that scale. Operating under the immense presence (& pressure) of large corporates, this venture eventually culminated in an exit to one of them. We created careers, we impacted millions of users, we made a dent (albeit small).

During these rollercoaster years, the bonds with friends who became cofounders were tested as we shared every risk. We drew on the brilliant talent located in India's Tier 2 cities, proving that innovation thrives everywhere. Meanwhile, quietly in the background, family and a partner believed in me despite their hidden worries.

Post-exit, I became a CXO. The stability was nice, the title impressive. I almost settled in. The corporate machine hummed along predictably, and for a while, that certainty felt like a well-earned rest after years of chaos.

Then last year, there was again a fork in the road: continue climbing the slow corporate ladder to the rooftop with a view, or jump into a rickety rocketship with duct taped engines that might take me to the sky or might explode mid-launch. I took the latter. Because that's the thing about us accidental entrepreneurs - we can't help but chase the next glorious accident waiting to happen.

The Middle Ground

When we talk about entrepreneurs, the world loves extremes: the spectacular failures with cautionary tales, or the legendary founders with their billion-dollar unicorns. But what about the vast, vibrant middle where most of us thrive?

We didn't start with grand visions of industry domination or exit strategies. We stumbled into this world following our creative impulses, chasing interesting problems, building things that mattered to us. And somehow along the way, we created businesses that stand somewhere between the flashy headlines. Not failures by any measure, but not the stuff of business magazine covers either.

This middle isn't where ambitions go to die, it's where they transform. Many of us still hunt unicorns and chase industry-defining breakthroughs. We're still hungry for scale, impact, and yes, even those big exits. The difference is in how we got here and why we keep pushing forward.

For the accidental entrepreneur, the journey from middle to massive isn't about checking boxes on some predefined path to success. It's about continuing to build with the same fire that accidentally led us here in the first place - that unquenchable urge to create something meaningful, regardless of where it ultimately lands on the success spectrum.

Embracing the Accidents

I’ve learnt to embrace the accidents, and to be on the roads less travelled and realize your story just unfolds along the way. This accidental path is a long winding road and it's an invitation to keep creating, to keep building, to keep pursuing what lights me up inside without the constraints of someone else's rulebook.

And in that sense, the undying fire of the accidental entrepreneur might be the most authentic form of success there is: not a trophy on the shelf, but a flame that continues to illuminate the path forward, day after day, year after year.

So I'll keep showing up, stoking that fire, curious about where it might lead next. Because that's what those of us who stumbled into this world do. We keep building because we can't imagine doing anything else. We burn on and the fire endures.