But Arundhati Nag cannot stop reading. The actress you last saw as Vidya Balan's mum in Paa, tells Priyanjali Ghose why Dostoevsky means so much to her
But Arundhati Nag cannot stop reading. The actress you last saw as Vidya Balan's mum in Paa, tells Priyanjali Ghose why Dostoevsky means so much to her
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It all started one afternoon when a 10 year-old girl walked into her school library and stumbled on Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Decades have passed since but the romance between Arundhati Nag and books continue. With more than 1,500 tomes in her collection, reading is now more of a reflex. The Paa actress, who lives on a farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, has an attic stacked with books ranging from religion, spirituality, fiction tou00a0 life sciences.
At the end of the day, Nag tells us, a book is her best bedtime companion. "I have broken so many spectacles. I invariably end up crushing them because I read in bed," she admits with a laugh.
Nag, who does not like restricting herself to a particular genre, remembers how she and her late husband, actor-director Shankar Nag, bonded over books when they first met in college.
"Books were a common ground for Shankar and me. We were into existentialism in those days. I used to thrive on Dostoevsky, Sartre and Camus. His first gift to me was Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Inside it he wrote a note addressed to me that read, 'My Seagull'."
She possesses at least five copies of each book in her collection "because friends often borrow my favourite titles." Her current collection is stacked with titles like Ekanath Ishwara's Upanishad, A K Rananujam's Speaking of Shiva, Girish Karnad's plays Hayavadana and Tughlaq, William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth and Anthony De Mello's The Prayer of the Frog. Nag is currently reading Kaifi and I -- A Memoir by Shaukat Kaifi, and looks forward to Gerald Durrell's Rosy Is My Relative, a book that's a gift from her daughter.
"I read two to three books at a time. I am not a fast reader, and if I love a book, I get locked into it for days," admits the actress.
Nag is on a sabbatical and in search for fresh subjects for a play. So, reading several short stories for inspiration is an everyday routine. "I'm on the lookout for any book which catches my fancy, so that I can immerse myself into it right from the first page."
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