Printers celebrate World Book Day with a good read

To commemorate this day, PrintWeek India spoke to five printers to find out what they are reading.

Surendran M of Techno Graphic Services was reading Malyalam novel Oru Desathinte Katha (The Story of a Locale) by Sankaran Kutty Pottekkatt. Oru Desathinte Katha portrays life in Athiranippadam. It sketches a unique history of the country while detailing the micro-history of a place. Sankaran Kutty Pottekkatt is the author of nearly 60 books which include ten novels, twenty-four collections of short stories, eighteen travelogues and four plays.
Oru Desathinte Katha is one of his most celebrated work which won the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award in 1972, and Jnanpith Award in 1980.

Vikas Raj Gupta, director, Zeb International was reading Malicious Gossip by Khuswant Singh. Malicious Gossip like most of Khuswant Singh’s work is blunt, perceptive, incorrigibly provocative and often amusing.
The book includes candid portrayals of public personalities such as Zail Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, Nani Palkhivala, Rajni Patel and Nargis Dutt along with beautifully weaved images of Delhi, Amritsar, Goa, Lucknow, Bhopal and Hyderabad. Peppered across the text are issues of communalism and terrorism, which are major issues which in today’s society.

Firoze Reshamvala of Lucid Prints had read S Hussain Zaidi’s Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia a while back. According to Reshamvala the book paints a compelling picture of Mumbai’s underworld since India’s independence. Dongri to Dubai is an attempt to chronicle the history of the Mumbai mafia. It is the story of notorious gangsters from Haji Mastan to Abu Salem, but above all, it is the story of India’s most wanted man, Dawood Ibrahim.
The narrative encompasses several milestones, from the rise of the Pathans to the formation of the Dawood gang. It is filled with short accounts which provide an unique insight into the underbelly of a diverse metropolis.
 

G Venugopal of Sterling read Does He Know a Mother’s Heart?: How Suffering Refutes Religion by Arun Shourie. According to him the feel of the book is excellent. The photo on the cover, the feel of the paper and the binding – all makes it a great book. The book begins with Arun’s own role as a caregiver to his son and later to his wife as well. Then he takes us along a journey of quoting religious texts of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism and then explaining how they don’t really makes sense. Extreme suffering can never be justified and bad karma, act of god, lack of faith is all but mere tags to help people to get over the suffering.
 

Deepak Sheth of Sheth Publishers swears by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, one of China’s Seven Military Classics. He has read it almost 15-20 times and calls it ‘serious reading’. The book is a prehistoric Chinese military treatise attributed to the author, Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military general, strategist and diplomat. It comprises of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare. Tzu emphasises on war being a necessary evil that must be avoided whenever possible. The book is commonly known to be the definitive work on military strategy and tactics of its time. It has had an influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, legal strategy and beyond.