hey fam welcome to Sant Reads and today
i'm going to be imitating Smriti.
i'm talking really fast in the first 5 seconds of the video
and i hope it sounds okay cheers!
hi fam and welcome to a new video
i today have episode two of bookish
chats with...
i previously did bookish chats with my
mother and now i have my brother
who has come very sweetly from Delhi
hi guys! hello his name is
Vidur and today we'll talk about books
because what else did we do here? Correct!
but we also have some beer to go with
this chat so we already one growler down
where is that?
(you know how to do that)
where is the growler? up there
oh okay so i already one of these down
and we have uh it looks like a bottle of tharra
love it! great! so essentially we're
here today to talk
about Vidur's reading preferences
and how he got into it which is
basically because of me
and essentially it's broken up into like
three or four parts
one is in terms of like just
introductions and how he got into
reading because of me
second bit is what i forgot only
altogether
second bit is about childhood
favorites and third one is about
current reading journey
in general miscellaneous and
then fourth bit is Vidur is gonna give
you some book recs!
so i will put all timestamps for that
down below so you can like
move forward if you want to but why
would you want to do that when you can
just
be very entertaining it's true we are
drinking
that helps! yes it's true.
okay so start
off with introduction right now only
Vidur is a year and a half younger than me and
the day he was born I renamed myself
to Smriti Didi instead of Smriti but he
has never called me
in his entire fucking life (V: It's a lie)
So that was great, that was a ridiculous
whatever exercise but yeah
I was - uh we were kind of complete opposite
because like in terms of i was like this
nerd and rule follower
child and i was very like people pleasing
and Vidur was like - nothing
like that - he was the Indian Dennis the Menace
true - he was he was - problem
child
naughty restless - just a piece of shit
yeah essentially
he would make my life a living hell all
i wanted to do was sit in the corner and
read a book and Vidur would just not
let me do it because he would just like
get into his various antics (it was fun)  yeah
so various things that he has done as a
child
have just been very annoying but what
came out of that
was that he saw me reading and he was
like
is that is this fun because she does
this quite a bit
so  - must be some merit to this - yeah so
that's how he got into it so what do you
wanna talk about it?
so I think uh Smriti read so
much that I
i assume there's some sense to what she
was doing at least
i don't know to some extent
so i started with like books like the
famous five, enid blyton - i read a lot of enid
blyton, nancy drew i mean this is obviously when i
was very very young so
don't judge me but...hey it was all my
books that he was reading he wasn't
buying anything
fair enough fair enough. so i think
there's a lot of mystery stuff when i
was younger
because it was gripping and i was i
wasn't
much of a reader but suspense and
mystery was enthralling and it kept me
intrigued so that's how it began
and i think i had
phases where i'd read in the next
stop because i was i was
an active kid of the sporty kid so i was
yeah i want to be on the pitch most of
the time then sit and
read and be stationary
for lack of a better word yeah that's
all i did yeah
so i think that's how i started reading
but
as as we grew older i saw that she's
a very voracious reader and i am not
and as usually as we've grown
older i i have i have developed my own
tastes in a lot of senses and
i think for the last couple of years i
don't know if i read many books but i
read many other things
like the news and stuff
wow, you're really getting into like all the all the
bits right
right yeah yeah but like we're supposed
to go part by
what is the second part okay no first
part is to talk about childhood what
are you done with childhood? so nancy
drew, Enid Blyton and all that stuff
right bas? (that's it?)
i can't actually remember - bahut jaldi wala video hone ka hai (it's going to be a fast video)
uh goosebumps (yeah!!) RL Stein read a
lot of RL Stein
oh and then we also read a lot of the
the terrible
history (correct!) and all of that like! so we had another cousin called
Varun and Varun also was a very
voracious reader as a
kid and he had these - Scholastic had
these terrible
tudors or like horrible histories
and like whatever Ghastly Geographies and like
all of that sort of stuff
which is basically a really fun way to
tell you about something
and like and educate you about something
but like be in a really fun way
so for example i remember this one thing
which was if you farted for like
one one and a half days you could light
a bulb
or some shit like that and i just found
that really funny and but it's also true
it's science!!
so if any of you can fart for one and a
half days let me know
because i want to light a bulb!
so yeah actually and those books are
super funny and super informative and we
were actually discussing about how we
should like re-read those
because i don't remember much of them at
all and
i remember them being amazing but i mean
unfortunately if you've read something
10 years ago you may not remember it so
whatever yeah 20 actually yeah that's
correct
so yeah check those out if you guys
like to learn things and laugh at the
same time
yeah they were great
and yeah so that was that was childhood
okay cool so now we are uh - Vidur was
talking about his books that he - and the sort of stuff
that he reads now
and then i interrupted him so we'll get
back into that so
what are the sort of books that you read
now and what are the things that you read now?
i think i touched about in the middle that a lot of my reading may not
necessarily be books now it's a lot of
news and current affairs and i like to
know what's happening in the world
so what trump is doing how modi was
kind of ruining the country to some extent.
(smriti thinking of right wing trolls)
i mean so i don't know just world
affairs is intriguing because
it's good to know what's happening in
the world and how it affects you or
if it doesn't affect you you should have
an opinion on it or at least know what's
happening
and i know i just i find that
interesting about because i was never a political
person but i think in the last
i know eight odd years our country has
changed so
yeah viscerally and so yeah (so is the
world) exactly
and there's this huge shift to
fundamentalism and nationalism and
people wanting to close their borders
and yeah
even in our country itself like you see
how there's a huge religious divide and
i i mean those aren't things that i
believe
us as indians were used to before the
current government unfortunately and
i think that informs us as as people are
we
are we okay with it is it is it do we
believe in it is it is it us
and so i need a lot of like uh
publications that write about this stuff
like
in india we look at left -
unfortunately left leaning because
i mean i wouldn't watch Republic TV for
news (yeah
it's only shouting) yeah so i mean scroll
uh print quint
the wire caravan if you read the caravan
it's an amazing magazine
the week it's another amazing magazine
yeah
the economist to some extent i mean so
yeah that's that's a lot of publication
i read now right now and
um i think in general yeah
yeah so basically what happened is that
with books in general i think i give
Vidur some - (yeah, I agree) what's it called? Inspiration? push?
whereas with the news and all of that
Vidur gives me because i'm also
pretty politically inclined or just
generally want to know what's up in the
world and yeah i think Vidur has this
thing so if anyone knows Vidur,
Vidur has this thing where he goes like
"so i read this article"
and then he goes into depth about that
article
and that is just a very bitter thing um
so yeah so that's basically what he does
so we have
invariably we have like these one-hour
calls where we discuss
various articles or various things that
we read in the news
and i think that also becomes a form of
reading because you shouldn't discount
reading those articles because some of
the caravan articles for example can
take you like up to 40 minutes to read
yeah 10 000 words
yeah because like it it's a lot of
information and a lot of information
that you need to read like slightly
slowly and digest as well so you can't
discount that sort of reading yeah. so yeah that i think is definitely
important as well
so visit what are the books though that
you have um
so i think actually i've been here in
bombay for
like three weeks now (he's leaving me!)
i got lucky because of this
massive
giant collection of books around me i
managed to read a lot of
books that i may not read myself
obviously because of Smriti and her
suggestions - i read a Salman Rushdie, I read
i read Palace of Illusions - amazing book
like really really
great read -  taught me a lot about
Mahabharata which I didn't know even
though my name is Vidur I should
probably know
more about this story than i did but uh
you're always learning
and um
other random (Essays in Love)
Essays in Love - again really nice if you haven't heard
of Alain De Botton
and you have any interest in philosophy
or just a human condition you know in
some sense. he writes -
uh my favorite book of is called the art
of travel
i'm a huge traveler i like travel a lot
and please follow him on instagram
because he posts a lot of pictures
about his travels - @viduronthemove!
so yeah he he he puts in a perspective
like
various things that you may not have uh
considered or looked at in the way that
he does. so for example there's a quote from
the book that i won't forget it goes
"journeys are the midwives of thought"
and i mean it's a pretty profound lie
i guess so and i think in general my reading days are very diverse i
mean i like
to again know what's happening in the
news so i gave Smriti a book which just
hasn't read yet
called beirut to jerusalem which
essentially
uh it's by this new york times columnist
called Thomas Friedman
and he basically
uh dissects or
it's a microcosm of the arab
condition like the whole
reason why the middle east is (is that
arab or just middle eastern?) middle east
sorry 'arabs' the wrong word yeah the
it's a microcosm of the middle
east condition that one book will
explain to you everything about what
what's wrong with the middle east yeah
and it's so interesting because like
i've always wanted to know more about
the middle east and what exactly is
making it that way
because in world news that's always a
sort of topic of conversation
Syria lebanon yemen egypt turkey
always i mean
yeah so so that's so whether these i
what i find interesting about withers
reading days is that he reads a lot of
non-fiction and non-fiction which
is um something that will you will try
to
uh is something about that he's
interested in so like being like
political or like travel
or like anything like that like i think
that's something that he definitely
likes reading
um but in terms of fiction he also did
some really weird cool
books he's like super into some weird
shit
so like uh what is that to rise again at
a decent hour
yeah so that's one and then also what
happens is because we travel to like jlf
together
um and we do a lot of these events
together so he lives in delhi and i'm in
bombay here
um and whenever we have to go to jlf
which is in jaipur we just ultimately
travel together
and we see all of these like people
talking
and yeah it's great so that's why we
kind of at JLF becomes our uh
our heart yeah and like it it gives us
like
tbr piles definitely yeah to read
because like some people you just like
you hear them and you're like fuck i
want to read this yeah i need to read
this person exactly
yeah so that's what happened with a lot
of us and a lot of our reading
any other books whether that come to
your mind that you're just like read
this book please? so to rising in a decent day is a
phenomenal book one of the best books
i've
read in quite a while it's super random
it's about a dentist
whose identity is stolen by another man
but it delves
into the realms of philosophy and
identity and
religion and it's it's really bizarre
but it's amazing
So basically Vidur likes
philosophy a lot so if you're have any
a philosophy book suggestions please
comment down below and let us know i
mean it's a human condition it's
it's it it it talks about why we are
here
what what our purpose is you know those
are things you should maybe question
once in a while
um i think my favorite one of my
favorite books uh
one of the books i read recently which i
really really liked was my first
Salman Rushdie - it's a book called the
ground beneath the earth
(Beneath Her Feet) feet! shit the ground
beneath her feet
that's the book by salman rushdie and
it's a massive like 500 600 page book
but um he's a writer that
unlike most people will keep you engaged
for the full
600 pages which is very difficult to do
and
it's impressive and it's about
a couple who are essentially
the rock gods of their time so it's
super
it's interesting because they're rock
stars and how everyone loves them yeah
it's really cool but and it's indians
who
are rock stars global rock stars which
is
even cooler cool but and again it's it's
got
it's got themes of love and death and
mental illness and
i mean it it touches many different like
themes tell me something though is it
difficult to read
do you think like as a language i really
don't know no no
i don't know yeah i don't think it's
difficult it's it's it's
long but it's not difficult to read okay
yeah
and thinking the last
six months what else did i really like i
gifted him Unaccustomed Earth
oh i love that customer really really i
said i think the last three months
Unaccustomed Earth was a book that kind of like
pushed me into like reading a lot more
because
for me what happens is that sometimes i
read something i really like
then it just makes me want to read more
and that's that was Unaccustomed Earth
she gave it to me on my
birthday which was
end May so all of june all of july all of
august i have read pretty voraciously
yeah i must have read maybe 15 books
this is what a good book recommendation
you can do it can really change your
reading habits yeah
um so yeah i
i thought it was amazing i read another
really cool book right after that called Famished Road by Ben Okri
uh again i think it's a pulitzer
prize-winning book
it's a booker winner prize and
it's magical realism but from africa's
point of view which is interesting
because most
magical realism is by and large from
latin america
so super interesting very well written
almost every uh sentence was poetic
and had like a simile and description and
make you think
yeah okay and i think um
i'd say one of the best books i've ever
read if you haven't done it is the god
of small things by Arundati Roy - that was easily one of the best books
i've ever read and i'll have to reread
it because
it is it has stuck with me and yes i
don't remember it as well and i
probably but that's what happens right
with books that sometimes
you don't remember the feeling is what
starts yes
you remember the feeling you remember
the feeling of oh my god this book was
amazing and you may not remember
it yeah but the feeling stays with you
and that's
what matters ultimately also yeah so go
do some reading!
okay no you don't have to do that!
okay so that was it i think
we have filmed quite a substantial
reason about yeah that was
cool and i thought we okay we wanna
drink more but it's cool we're gonna
drink more off camera
cheers guys cheers i've clearly been
drinking way much more but it's cool
but cool thank you so much for
watching if you like this video then
do hit the
thumbs up button and comment down
below with any of your suggestions
that you have if you have any other
further questions
for us and we will see you  - i will see
you
in another video. Vidur, I don't know?
where  he'll be. Hopefully very soon yeah maybe
sometime
he's leaving me piece of shit!
leaving me anyway okay
bye
see you guys!
cool that was easy. that was really easy!
you
