10 of our favourite folks tell us about the books that changed them

Akhil Sharma, Author

“I saw the animated movie based on Charlotte’s Web (by EB White) before I read the book, when I was eight. The book contains surprisingly few visuals, and to a child unused to applying his imagination in the ways that books require, the movie served as a crutch to magnify such details as how much Wilbur the pig loves food or how gentle Charlotte the spider sounds. To me, as for Wilbur, Charlotte was both mother and girlfriend. When she lays her eggs, I felt as if I had been betrayed. When she dies, I wept as if someone dear to me had died.

Reading the book now, I am surprised by its ruthlessness — that the farmer in the book is poor and struggling, that Charlotte appears to have her own concerns, that Wilbur imposes and relies on the kindness of other animals. This roughness captures the anxiety of being a child and, to some extent, the anxiety of being an adult.”

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Kiran Rao, Film-maker

“I wish I’d read Shel Silverstein when I was young, I’d have been a different person. Where The Sidewalk Ends opens with the invitation, “If you are a dreamer, come in...”, and then you are off through his ingenious creations — sometimes macabre, sometimes profound and almost always laugh-out-loud funny. He was masterful and I wish he was alive so that I could meet him and hear him sing.”

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Kalpana Swaminathan, Author

“There are books you grow up with and those you grow up on, but there’s also the rare book that grows into you and hibernates — till it erupts without warning as a bubble of laughter or a wrench in the gut, and there you are, enmeshed in its story again. All You’ve Ever Wanted (by Joan Aiken) is the sort of magic that defies genre: surreal, tender and brutal all at once. The Armitage family is the only one I’ve met that's more exciting than my own!”

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Amruta Patil, Author & Illustrator 

“Of the slew of Russian books very important to me — all freely available in the boondocks I grew up in, thanks to the ‘Hindi-Russi Bhai Bhai’ 1980s — When Daddy Was A Little Boy (by Alexander Raskin) was my towering favourite. The stories, all real and droll, subversively featured Daddy, as the now-awesome, now-jackass protagonist. As a child, I remember having an “Aha!” moment when I realised that irredeemably grown-up entities could have had an accessible, sparky past.”

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Samhita Arni, Author & Illustrator

“The Story Of Ferdinand (by Munro Leaf) is about a sensitive bull in Spain, who doesn’t want to fight; he just wants to smell flowers. It’s a great book about being different and not conforming to expectations. Most importantly, it was published in 1936, on the eve of World War II, so it’s important to consider its (then problematic) message of gentleness and pacifism — which, resulted in the book being burned in Nazi Germany. It was also, apparently, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite books.”

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Padma Lakshmi, TV Host & Author

“I never really grew up with Dr Seuss’ books but when I was going to Italy to do my first television show, a friend gave me Oh, The Places You’ll Go! as a going-away present. I love the whimsy of the prose. And how it feels new every time you read it. It’s really just a long poem. I will always remember it as part of a turning point in my life.”

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Jerry Pinto, Author

“There’s a moment in Black Beauty (by Anna Sewell) where the horse of the title stops short on a cold and stormy night. Her master tries to push her on but she won’t go. And then they discover that the bridge is down and he would have plunged into the river beneath them and drowned. Beauty’s master says something like, “Beauty, you...” And then I was sent off to have a bath. I spent the bath in torment, wondering what praise her master would heap on her, what paeans, what encomiums, what words would befit such service. Then I came back and ordered my mother to pick up where she had left off. There was nothing after that ‘you’. It was a new paragraph. That was all Sewell had him say. And I learned a lesson. You can make space for the reader even in a children’s book.”

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Twinkle Khanna, Author & Entrepreneur

“Ten years ago, I bought The Little Prince (by Antoine de Saint-Exupery) for my son, who was three, and found that this children’s book is meant for the very grown-ups the author had such disdain for. It’s a simple narrative my son could follow as well as an allegory about life, loneliness and love. Last month, I began reading it aloud again to my daughter. She looks at the illustrations avidly like her brother once did and we cuddle in bed, hopping along from one asteroid to another with the little prince.”

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Nilanjana Roy, Author & Columnist

"As a child, I read Kids And Cubs (by Olga Perovskaya) at least seven times and regarded these beautiful stories about animals rescued as a shopping list. I wanted a wolf, but thought it best to work up to this gradually, given my mother’s temper was frayed by the many unexpected occupants she’d had to provide for: pigeons, kittens, and once, a lost child. This last one didn’t work out well, because the child was not technically lost.

“Where did you find this fellow?”
“He was lost!”
“I’m not lost! My home is right there! They made me come with them!”
“He’s confused. The trauma has addled his brains. We should keep him in the garage.”

The boy burst into tears. I blame the books.”  

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Sidin Vadukut, Author & Columnist

“The Firebird (by Dorothy Aitchison) was my first experience of ambitious storytelling that spanned places, settings and characters. I can still recall the smell of the pages, the colours of the pictures and the darkness that seemed to pervade the story. The Firebird was the springboard from which I launched into a lifetime of reading, thinking and imagining.”