Bookstrapping: Inside the Mukerji family’s love affair with books

At Bookstrapping, we celebrate books. From time to time, we pepper our reviews with interviews with families that have nourished a vibrant reading culture. One such family is the Mukerji- Tanuja, Kajol and Tanishaa. And like every family, their love of books is uniquely their own.

Tanisha spoke to us about the family's reading culture and how her mother- an original lectiophile in her own right sparked the habit in her children. Here are our five Bookstrapping eye-openers into the Mukerji family's love for books.

1. Mom was a very avid reader. Dad was more of a writer. Mom could read anything, from Christianity to Islam Hinduism to Vedic traditions, she was happy when she read. I remember that Wayne Dyer was a big favorite for her. She would read also lot of science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert.

2. Us sisters have grown up around books. Books were every where around the house- not necessarily as a structured library. I don’t remember what mum read to us when we were really young, but there was always a bedtime story. Either she would read or make something up. Even grandma was a reader, she would mark passages out to read to us later. One vivid memory is that my dad would read scripts to me! What fun!

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3. The women in my family are not book snobs. From Mills and Boons, to Tinkle to Amar Chitra Katha, we give everything a chance. But our pace tends to be very different. In the same timeframe that Kajol would finish 15 books, mom would finish 10 and I would finish just 1. Kajol is comparatively, the most selective among us.

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4. Mom would read during her shoot and also at home. Watching her read, made us readers. And if we accompanied her somewhere, visiting the bookstore was by default. We have never come out empty handed from a bookstore. There were evenings when all three of us just sit and read a book. That’s our way of bonding and we often gush over a favorite book to each other. There were no grand announcements- 'today we will go to the bookstore' or some such. My mom embodied a love of reading and never forced us to like the books that everybody liked. She let us choose and that's why we started opening books and discovering joy in reading them.

5. I love fantasy fiction. I read beyond just the popular books. I love Sara Douglass and of course Tolkien though he was more verbose. One of my recent favorites is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Hanson. As a practicing Buddhist, I can relate to it. Among Indian authors, I've enjoyed Ashwin Sanghi’s Krishna Key and Amish’s Suhel Dev. I do enjoy audio books and also have a Kindle on my phone for when I travel.

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I have started enjoying books on ‘brain health’ in particular. The fun part is that even though all of us have different tastes, sometimes we converge on a book- Kajol and I absolutely loved Fountainhead during our teenage years. I feel that ‘Howard Roark’ stands out even more today. So I read it again sometimes. In a world where people try to subdue originality, Ayn Rand's voice and Howard Roark’s character are magical. And I feel that we have finally arrived in an era she created ages ago- an era where every original creator finds their fans!

Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ Asia's first reading coach, you can find her on Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta.