In the last twenty years or so, proportion of printed books I read by flipping physical pages have greatly reduced, while electronic or e-book I read from my iPad, and audiobooks I “listen to”, have dramatically increased.

There are many reasons. The first – I have always been a very heavy reader, right from my childhood. Consequently, I simply ran out of space to store all this many books, no matter how many book shelves I buy, in multiple homes spread across multiple continents where I stayed at one time or another.

The other reason is – I do not usually go for popular novels, or fiction. An overwhelmingly high number of the books I read are non-fiction, and educational I nature. Example – I have not read even one Harry Potter book, but have read around half a dozen of Charles Darwin alone. Unfortunately, there has not been munch interest in reading such books by my family members. In other words, I am the only one reading my kind of books in my home. After I have read one – it just becomes a space consuming dead weight never to be touched by a human hand again.

Ultimately such a book will likely become expensive fuel for someone’s wood burning fireplace, if one still has such a contraption.

Consequently, I have more electronically delivered books, than printed ones. They take up virtually no space. My iPad can store several hundred e-books. My computer can store thousands of e-Books and audio books. My phone too can store a hundred audio books at any time easily, and help me “listen” to them while siting along at a cafe, or having dinner by myself, or even when sitting on the potty. I have not counted how many such books I have across multiple formats and in multiple languages, but my rough guess is, it should be above 500 and less than a thousand.
This is not counting all the printed books I have bought or been presented with.

The images here are a minuscule sample of them – but a pattern can be seen here. I have spent a lot of time understanding human beings – their history, their evolution, their track record and their projected path into the near future. Part of it can be attributed to natural curiosity. Where did I come from. Where am I going. Added to that, is a near solidified belief that the planetary environment on earth is going to become major obstacles to life as usual for the living planet, and business as usual for the human society. These roadblocks or major environmental obstacles will not be of extra terrestrial origin, such as an asteroid strike. Nor will they be geologic, like massive volcanism from the earth’s core. They will be created at the surface and be a direct result of human interference.

My belief has hardened over a long period of observation of the rapidly changing world around me, and supplemented by books from on history to economy to paleoanthropology.

I no longer believe man to be God’s finest creation – first because man is not the finest but the worst creature on earth, which in turn proves the second point – that God does not exist, else He could never have made such a humongous blunder of creating humans in the first place.

Besides, the history of evolution of life has proved, time and time again, that once in a while a creature evolves with what appears to be super-competitive traits, and begins to sort of dominate the planet. But then, soon enough, the qualities that made the animal competitive begins to turn against him or his environment, and eventually, the creature goes extinct, to be replaced by another group of a wholly different model type.



Dinosaurs, as a group, lasted almost 160 million years on earth. It needed a massive asteroid strike to put at end to their reign.

In comparison, modern humans have been here for a mere 50 thousand years and we have cooked as well as poisoned and rotted the planet is such a short time in breathtaking speed, so much so that we ourselves have to go and will are taking most of the living world with us.

One interesting side note is – noting the control that the religious groups still exert on freedom of expression. Two hundred years after Darwin’s writings, his three books on evolution by natural selection of all creatures except humans are freely available across formats. However the one book, which applies the same logic to origin of Humans, namely the book “Descent of Man” is heavily restricted. There is no audiobook on it so far by reputed content providers, which I find incredible. You can, thankfully, still get an e-book and a printed book. You can also get chapter by chapter audio rendition of the book free of charge by the volunteer organization such as LibriVox.

But even the advertisement for the printed version is careful enough to describe the book as describing the “controversial theory of evolution”.

There is nothing controversial about evolution, in my mind. The only controversy involves the stupidity of man and the extraordinary control that bigots have on free speech in the very western society that boasts of freedom of speech.

Anyhow, this short post on books is perhaps a window to my search of my own identity. A line from a Bengali song of Tagore rings true, so I added it – my quest to understand myself is never going to end.