I forget things very easily. Birthdays, dates, faces, names, characters - anything specific . Everything gets enveloped in a cloud of smoke with the passage of time no matter how memorable it may seem.But I soon found out that this particular defect which has produced quite a few problems in the never-ending exams, was actually a blessing in disguise. It helped when it mattered the most and that is in giving hours of pure happiness from reading some wonderful books - again and again.

I have always thought my family to be an introspective lot whom could at the same time give life to any social event. But while I may have inherited the former, somehow I have always remained aloof in the social part. Maybe the absence of any real pressure from my (intelligent) parents inspired my initial fantasy to books. Thus I spent hours and hours, behind wild and wonderful stories, which should rather have been spent learning or in comradeship. But while my parents continued to make my life easy, the same could not be said true for my acquaintances in class. A step into the pants of a teenager bestowed upon my ego a need for being known rather than knowing thyself. Thus came the transition of a fantasizing oddball to a normal person ( define normal as one who indulges in the pursuits that is followed by at least 75% of your peers:) .

But like a marriage never broken, I was re-united with my books by the stories about "the boy who lived" - special thanks to my friend Amol who not only introduced me to harry potter but also spent a lot of time coercing me to read it. It only took a few days for the 'mysteries of the the five, secrets of the seven, the charm of the drew and the bravery of the hardy' to be swept aside by the "Goblet of Fire", the first Harry Potter book I read. It was love at first sight. Soon I was saving every bit of money I could to bring my collection of HP books up to date. But the 5th book ( I was the first one in Trivandrum city to buy it or so the shopkeeper told me) came as a big disappointment for me which made me go after different authors notably Ayn Rand, Jeffrey Archer, Micheal Crichton, John Grisham, Dan Brown, Clive Cussler and lot more. This was also the time I became heavily influenced by the philosophies of Ayn Rand in her two books "The Atlas Shrugged" and "The fountainhead".