When I was little, my grandfather used to take me to the bookstore and get me children's magazines. I developed a habit of reading very early in my life and it helped me a lot during my life. The downside of the habit of reading is that you become too idealistic and when the real world hits you it hits you hard, but then due to the same habit you are well equipped when it happens. Read good authors, not that anything is going to help you when "the sky falls down" but writings by good authors are a consolation. When I was a kid I used to read a lot of comics. Comics are a beautiful way of unlocking the imagination of children. I read a lot of literature, both Hindi and English. Like many children of the 90s I love Harry Potter, it's a beautiful book. I still like it and I think it's one of the best children's novels. I read authors like Khushwant Singh and Taslima Nasreen and many others. When I was in college I used to do a lot of poetry and story writing. Grammar has never been my thing but I write for the sake of creativity, expression and aesthetics. I read a lot of short story writers, like Chekhov, O. Henry and many others. I started reading classics in college and read Conan Doyle, Tolstoy, William James and many others. I have been a fan of Kafka since my early youth and I like existential literature. I like noir for the style it has. And as the world opened up to me I started liking transgressive fiction and cosmic horror. At present my favourite genres are science fiction and cosmic horror. I have a lot of appreciation for Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Back during my younger years I used to like transgressive fiction, but then there is so much transgression in the world itself that that fiction is almost reality. I also enjoy dark humour a lot. Dark humour is not everyone's cup of tea but then it doesn't have to be.
Literature is the mirror of society and also the mirror of the mind of the individual who writes it. When I was in college I used to write satire and existential literature. Some of the stories that I wrote were dark and dealt with things like revenge, others were romantic and idealistic kinds. I like revenge stories, because I have appreciation for justice and I have always wanted to write a noir story with a lot of stylized violence. But I am not into writing fiction anymore, still I will give an excerpt of a stylized noir (and a bit transgressive) fantasy that I had written:
"She was so beautiful, his mother, and that's why a deva from the heavens made love to her when she was asleep. A minor deva, he was infamous among the apsaras for his ways, they called him accidental deva, thought of him as a lustful asura, and he was lustful, and so his mother got pregnant with him. She died a lonely death, just after his birth, because that's how the Indian society is to a single mother, and she couldn't explain how she became pregnant, she couldn't explain even to herself. He was a beautiful boy, and the government took him in as a baby, along with others for Project 1347. That's what was happening to all orphaned babies at that time. They were taken in by the government for Project 1347 and mothers were assigned to them. A lab situated deep in the jungles of Himachal Pradesh directly under the department of defence was tasked with Project 1347. He was assigned a name, Vikram, and a codename, 077.
Vikram was sitting in the car waiting for Tanya. He lit a cigarette and changed the radio channel to news. Matoshree (Mother) was directly overseeing the mission. Tanya was inside the hotel having sex with Prateek Goel, Indian head of an American technology company, the camera on her handbag recording everything going on on the bed. Prateek is fucked, Vikram thought to himself. Maatoshree would now blackmail him to give secrets of the cutting edge technology his company was researching on, and of course the Indian government would then sell it to the Indian corporates who were just too lazy to develop their own authentic technologies. Tanya was Matoshree's go to for jobs like these, she was extremely beautiful and good with conversations, as far as skills go, everyone who was a part of Project 1347 was skilled. Skills were a dime here, what was important were their roles."
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