I had woke up at around five, quite a bit earlier than expected. The continuous shaking of the train berth doesn’t really help you in sleeping. But still I continued to lie down flat while awake, idling away with nothing particular to do.

It was drizzling outside. There was a cool wind blowing. And I had was wearing an unbuttoned full sleeve shirt over a t-shirt. That was enough to shield me from the cold of the AC Compartment.

I continued lying down not yet ready to move out.

The sun had started to break out, when I decided to finally get down and take a walk.

I didn’t have my cellphone on me. Outside the compartment, one the doors was open, and the morning wind was making its way in through it.

As I stood by the door, my full sleeve shirt blew quite a bit along the direction of the wind. The gentle drops of rain refreshed my face and the green fields outside made it feel like everything was at peace. And that was when the idea struck me.

What an amazing photo it would make.

If I can take a photo of the fields or better yet, if I can tell someone to take a photo of me in that pose looking out. And like a switch turned on, my joy of the moment turned into the frustration of not having my phone on me to capture it.

As if right on cue, my body was ready to go back to my seat, get my phone and come right back. It was as if the moment, the serenity of the wind, the comfort of the moment had ceased to exist and an irritation took hold of me.

It was as if my being there in the moment was not enough, and I had to somehow document it with a probability of sharing it online. A rather performative exercise showcasing a private moment of calm.

But I persisted, forcing myself to remain standing there. And after sometime, the calm returned but not as much as it had been.

Sometime later I returned to my seat. I don’t have any photos to show or share, but that was a moment I had lived in.

You have heard of those people, who used to read a lot of books but now have sharply fallen off the cliff. I used to be one of those. But 2023 and 2024 have been different. 2025 has been off to a good enough start and I hope to continue this in the coming years.

So what changed? These are the five things which helped me most, and I hope it can be of help to you too

1. Accepting that it is not going to be an immediate process

If change was a magic wand, that I could have waved and spontaneously transformed into a voracious reader, trust me I would definitely have done that. But that was not going to happen. So the first step was accepting this. I had realized that I needed to read more, and I was okay with taking a while to reach there. As a result, I went easy on myself. Trying to forcefully change something suddenly might get you results in the short term but in the long term you run a serious risk of burning out.

2. Starting with something easy or short

Look at that 800 plus page tome of a book on your bookshelf. You definitely don’t want to start reading there. Let’s go from the first gear. Pick up either something which is easy or short or both that gives you the initial boost of confidence to carry on. What did I begin with? Although Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun was my first read of 2023, but it was not until my second read that I started picking up momentum. And that was a play.

‘Waiting for Godot’. Not necessarily an easy read, but definitely a short one. For a while I continued as such gradually building up. My crowing moment came in November of 2023, when I read the one book on my bookshelf whose size had been scaring me for close to a decade.

Stephen King’s The Stand. A massive 1300 plus page epic of a book, with a world and characters you will never forget. It was a delight both reading and completing the book.

3. Breaking down your reading sessions into multiple short batches

I know it is not always easy to find dedicated long stretches of time, just for the sake of reading. Life is busy, things pop up unannounced, unexpected hurdles abound. But in the end, it is better to move slow than to stop moving entirely. Even something as less as three to four pages at a stretch multiple times a day can work wonders.

The important thing is to keep moving, and stop waiting for the perfect time, when you can wind down and properly read a book. Those experiences are the best, but just because you cannot find them every time doesn’t mean you should completely abandon reading.

4. You don’t have to fix yourself to one book at a time.

Trying to read multiple books really shot up my reading. Sometimes the book you are reading currently can really loose your interest and in times such as that it is best to pick up something else, set that aside for a while and then get back to it. That immensely reduces the chance of a burnout, and ensures that your reading keeps on moving without any breaks.

Do you like it when, you have clearly defined goals for which book on which day of the week or you seem to be more of a mood based reader. See what works for you and stick with that.

5. Remember that you are your own reader

‘These are the ten best books you should read before you die’

‘You have not read this book, how can you even call yourself a reader?’

‘I read a hundred books last year, and that is minimum anyone should read.’

There is noise. A lot of noise. It is easy to be caught up in it all and completely burn yourself out chasing approval and validation from people who don’t even know you exist. You know best what works for you. Stay focussed on what you love to read.

For my part, I have no intention of being one of those you flaunt an insane amount of reads by the time the year ends. That works for them, not for me. There are many other aspects of my life that I have to balance alongside my reading.

Yes, I will definitely encourage you to go beyond your comfort zone of reading, but that should be done once in a while. Not so much that you end up even dreading picking up a book.

Enjoy the process, it is not a competition, it is a journey of exploring new ideas and new worlds. Make it worthwhile and happy reading.

A city in transition. A race to the future. An identity in crisis, one that is being constantly bludgeoned by the machines of the future.

Yang’s Taipei Story has its characters in a limbo, caught in the cycle of rapid modernization. Characters who feel like that by the time they have adjusted to the new, it would already have become old.

Early on in the movie, an architect remarks while looking at the city on how he himself is not able to distinguish between what he has built and what he has not. While it might seem like a throwaway line, but this forms the crux of the movie.

And if you think that this just might be a story unique to Taipei of that era, well think again.

Homogeneity, uniformity, sameness. Being stuck in a world, which rapidly changes in the pursuit of latest trends. Progress and modernization that seem to be accelerating at such a pace, that it is gradually eroding away at our own sense of identity. An identity that is evolving at such a pace, that there seems to be no time to decide on who we are.

Like that hamster in a wheel, we keep on running to catch up while never realizing that by the time we get there the goalpost might have moved ahead. That dream job, that dream possession, that dream vacation which of that is actually your dream and which is just the noise of all that happening around you.

The characters of Taipei Story drift around, caught up in the glitter of progress while their inner selves seem vacant, lost, forgotten. Materialistic progress that seems hollow, characters caught in the nostalgia of what has been lost. Neon lights that shine brightly on faces that feel no joy for it.

Progress, freedom, expansion but at what price? A rush into the future while breaking down what made us unique. A race into the trends, a race to fit-in, grow fast while lacking the time to even pause and briefly think on what it actually entails. This is what Yang’s story is about. It is a question on this toll of modernization, on this loss of the individual.

That was exactly the headline that grabbed me when I picked up Papillon at my local bookstore. That promise of a nerve-wracking thrilling experience. But little did I know how much more this book had in it to offer me.

Imagine being in your twenties, the prospect of an exciting life right in front of you. Dreams, desires, ambitions, you are filled up with it to the core. But then, just out of nowhere, over the matter of just a few days, it has all been lost.

That is exactly the situation, which Henri Charriere ‘Papillon’ finds himself in. Sentenced to a lifetime of imprisonment in the absolutely inhumane prison of French Guiana in the 1930’s, falsely implicated for a murder he didn’t commit. A prison where death is so commonplace, no one even bats an eye. And thus begins, this documentation of his experiences.

Make no mistake, Papillon provides you with thrills aplenty. But what I was not prepared for absolute gut-punch of the power of human perseverance that shines through the book. Of simple acts, that light a beacon of the hope of humanity even in the midst of sheer inhumane surroundings. Of how, the societal tag of ‘civilization’ doesn’t mean anything, as Papillon finds the best of people amongst the rejects of society. Lepers, uneducated settlers, slaves, so called ‘uncivilized’ tribes cut off from the progress of the world.

And in the midst of this, Papillon drags on, holding on to his goal of freedom so rigidly that nothing is able to pull his determination down. Inhumane cells, rat infested prisons that flood during the high tides, prisons where you are forced to do hard labour, and what probably is the most harrowing experience a human being could be subjected to, solitary confinement. One where although you may not be treated brutally , but your basic need for human connection and speech is snatched away from you as you are forced into silence no idea about the outer world, and any deviation from it leads to brutal punishments.

And he survives through it all, as the fire that fuels him changes from hatred of the people who put him into the prison, to one of desire of showing the world that even someone whom that society has rejected and cast away can rise up again to be a human being. An independent, responsible and respectable human being.

Papillon is a book that broke me with the inhumane worlds it took me to, inspired me with the perseverance, and in the end left me hopeful of humanity and how it finds a way in even the most unexpected of places.

Wake up. Get your daily chores done. Show up to work. Do the things that you’ve been doing mostly everyday at work. Grab lunch. Get done with your shift. Head back home. Do you evening chores. Get to sleep. Rinse and repeat the entire process day after day for years and years. This is what life is mostly like. Dull, predictable, repetitive.

Sure there can be moments of excitement. Some thrilling adventure sports, a vacation you took, a marathon you ran, but when taking life as a whole all of this becomes just events that are not the term. And that is okay. The continuous pursuit of thrills, can be quite a dangerous route. A life so attuned to seeking highs, that eventually those highs become numbing, and when not achieved can lead you to your doom.

Solve your problems instantly. Become a millionaire in a day. Get a dream body in a week. Become an overnight social media sensation. Most of the time, it just doesn’t happen. The results that you seek are at the end of a process. A process involving multiple decisions taken repeatedly for days and months and years that eventually stack up and push you along.

And this acceptance is what we have seemingly lost in this age of instant gratification, this age of never-ending stimulation as we have eroded away our patience in our chase of the latest fads.

So it would be good to sometimes just pause, take a deep breath, slow down and realise that results might not come overnight, but you have to take those little steps day after day which will snowball you into the person you want to be. And when you are the person that you wanted to be, at that time life will continue to remain mostly mundane.