Reading List | Each Book Has a Character of its Own

Air Vice Marshal Anil Golani (retd)

The habit of reading, which if inculcated can pay dividends beyond imagination. There are many who find books intimidating and the very thought of picking one up to read impulsively goads them to apparently easier, and in their conviction better pursuits like listening to music, playing a game or anything else that amuses them. This baggage, to an entire generation, probably comes from school days when thick fat syllabi books on mathematics, science, arts and history evoked an unwanted sense of repulsion.

Tantalising as they are, there are two things that must be remembered as far as books are concerned. Each book has a character and story of its own, which like human beings must never be judged from the external appearance or the cover. Secondly, it takes time to get to know a person and one has to invest time and patience in relationships, which comes out in any book as you turn the pages. The beauty of a good book is that one doesn’t have to make an effort to turn the page, you do it compulsively because it is ‘unputdownable.’ Slowly and surely, as the story unfolds one gets to understand the subject and the context in a matter of hours, that are required to finish reading the book. What one gets in a couple of hours through any book is the painstaking research of the author, which probably took him/ her many arduous hours of work spanning into months and maybe years.

Continuing with the ‘Reading List’ for those in the military, national security and aerospace domain, from practitioners to scholars, here is an additional list of five books that ought to be on their ‘must read’ list.

Dereliction of Duty by H.R. McMaster: It is extremely important to know why nations go to war. The common understanding being ‘national interest’ could more often than not be a fallacy. The United States went to war in Vietnam, losing 58,000 soldiers apart from more than two million on either side in Vietnam, in a conflict that tested the mettle of a modern and well-equipped force against a guerrilla insurgency. From Dwight Eisehower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, this war turned out to be