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JUSTICE PRABHA SRIDEVAN

JUSTICE PRABHA SRIDEVAN

Authors who made quite an impact: Kalki and Alexandre Dumas. As a child, my cousins and I would have verbal wars over which actor would play the various characters in Kalki's novels, be it "Sivakamiyin Sabadam" or "Ponniyin Selvan". My mother would read aloud from "The Count of Monte Cristo" every evening. If we misbehaved, the punishment was we were kept out of the reading. So we would be on our best behaviour! In recent times, "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" by Harold Bloom was fascinating. Bloom believes human nature was invented by the Bard.

Favourite authors: I love thrillers, that too the British ones. So my list comprises Agatha Christie, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell and Dick Francis. I enjoy reading biographies, especially those connected with the legal field.

Current read: Now, it's some legal stuff. But the last book I read was "The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession" by Paulo Coelho. It was a superb read. It talks of a state of spiritual ecstasy, a theme that's universal.

Books I recommend to family and friends: Jonah Blank's "Arrow of the Blue-skinned God" and "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. The first is a travelogue on the Ramayana. It juxtaposes the epic with the present, moving as it does from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka. The second is a gripping read about life, which says anything can happen to anyone at anytime.

If you could have dinner with one writer: Since I have already had a conversation with the writer through his or her book, I do not want to concretise the experience by meeting the person in flesh and blood.

(JUDGE, MADRAS HIGH COURT, SPOKE TO SAVITHA GAUTAM)

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