A list of books, articles, and poems that have shaped my understanding of reality — guiding, challenging, and transforming me, and leaving a lasting mark on how I see the world.
1.
History
of India (2 vols.) — V. D. Mahajan
2.
The Invasion That Never Was
— Michel Danino
3.
The Story of My Experiments with Truth — M. K. Gandhi
4.
An Autobiography — Jawaharlal Nehru
5.
The Manual of English Grammar and Composition — J. C. Nesfield
6.
High School English Grammar and Composition — P. C. Wren & H. Martin
7.
English Romantic Poetry — esp. William
Wordsworth & John Keats
8.
The Merchant of Venice —
William Shakespeare
9.
Paradise Lost — John
Milton
10. The Swiss Family Robinson — Johann David Wyss
11. Lost Horizon — James Hilton
12. Around the World in Eighty Days — Jules Verne
13. The Apple Cart — George Bernard Shaw
14. Animal Farm — George Orwell
15. All My Sons — Arthur Miller
16. Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
17. Windmills of the Gods — Sidney Sheldon
18. Freedom at Midnight — Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre
19. Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie
20. Delhi: A Novel — Khushwant Singh
21. Malgudi Days and Other Stories — R. K. Narayan
22. Idols — Sunil Gavaskar
23. The Fast Men — David Taylor
24. A Brief History
of Time — Stephen Hawking
25. A Critical
History of Western Philosophy — Y. Masih
26. The Problems
of Philosophy — Bertrand Russell
27. A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy — Chandradhar
Sharma
28. Readings in
Vedic Literature: The Tradition Speaks for Itself — Satsvarupa dasa Goswami
29. The Nectar
of Instruction — Rupa
Goswami, trans. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
30. Perfect
Questions, Perfect Answers — A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada & Bob Cohen
31. The
Communist Manifesto
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
32. On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
33. A Grammar of
Politics — Harold
Laski
34. Economics — Paul Samuelson
35. Politics
Among Nations — Hans
Morgenthau
36. A History of
Modern Times from 1789 — C. D. M. Ketelbey
37. The Globalization of World Politics — John Baylis and Steve Smith
38. Kashmir — M. J. Akbar
39. The Periphery Strikes Back — Udayon Misra
40. Strangers of
the Mist — Sanjoy
Hazarika
41. Introduction
to the Constitution of India — Durga Das Basu
42. The Charter
of the United Nations and The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights
As an ISKCON devotee in
JNU, New Delhi
43. Srila
Prabhupada Lilamrta
(7 vols.) — Satsvarupa dasa Goswami
44. Caitanya-caritamrta (9 vols.) — Krishna Kaviraj Goswami;
trans. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
45. Gaudiya
Vaishnava Bhajans — esp. Narottama Dasa Thakura and Bhaktivinoda Thakura
46. Prabhupada’s
Books — A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, esp. Bhagavad Gita As It Is
and Srimad Bhagavatam (18 vols.)
47. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 and What is History? — E. H. Carr
48. The End of History? — Francis Fukuyama
49. The Clash of Civilizations? — Samuel Huntington
50. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction — Cynthia Weber
51. India’s China War — Neville Maxwell
52. The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West — Joseph Needham
53. The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn
54. Diplomacy and On China — Henry Kissinger
55. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers — Paul Kennedy
56. Soft Power:
The Means to Success in World Politics — Joseph Nye
57. Why I Am an
Atheist — Bhagat
Singh
58. Annihilation
of Caste — B. R.
Ambedkar
59. Six Glorious
Epochs of Indian History — V. D. Savarkar
60. A History of
Western Philosophy
— Bertrand Russell
61. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
62. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
63. Lord of the Flies — William Golding
64. The Canon of Sherlock Holmes
— Arthur Conan Doyle
65. Kane and Abel Trilogy — Jeffrey Archer
66. Suspense, Crime & Business Novels — Sidney Sheldon &
Tilly Bagshawe
67. Sri
Bhaktisiddhanta Vaibhava (3 vols.) — Bhakti Vikasa Swami
68. Jaiva Dharma and Shri Krishna Samhita — Bhaktivinoda Thakura
69. Brhat Bhagavatamrtam (3 vols.) — Sanatana Goswami, trans. Gopiparanadhana Das
70. Tattva Sankhyan
— Madhvacharya Ananda
Tirtha (commentaries by Jaya Tirtha, Raghavendra Tirtha and Sridhara Tirtha)
71. Sarva Darshana
Sangraha — Madhavacharya Vidyaranya
72. A History of
Indian Philosophy (5
vols.) — Surendranath Dasgupta
73. Civilization: The West and the Rest — Niall Ferguson
74. Being
Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism — Rajiv Malhotra
75. Chasing the
Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State — Tarek Fatah
76. Christianity:
The First Three Thousand Years — Diarmaid MacCulloch
77. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon — Daniel Dennett
78. The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl Popper
Teaching at RGNUL, Patiala and Chanakya University, Bengaluru
79. The History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
80. Republic — Plato
81. Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics and Politics — Aristotle
82. Records of the Grand Historian — Sima Qian
83. Confessions and The City of God — Augustine
84. The Incoherence of the Philosophers — Al Ghazali
85. Summa contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica — Thomas Aquinas
86. Muqaddimah — Ibn Khaldun
87. The Works of Vijnanabhikshu
— Vijnanabhikshu, trans. Andrew Nicholson in Unifying Hinduism and Rajiv
Malhotra in Indra’s Net
88. The Prince and Discourses on the First Ten
Books of Titus Livius — Machiavelli
89. The Large Catechism — Martin Luther
90. Institutes of the Christian Religion — John Calvin
91. Leviathan —
Thomas Hobbes
92. Two Treatises of Government — John Locke
93. The Spirit of Law — Baron de Montesquieu
94. Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Federalist
Papers, US Constitution, Bill of Rights and Other Amendments — Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison, John Jay, et al.
95. Reflections on the Revolution in France — Edmund Burke
96. Democracy in
America — Alexis de
Tocqueville
97. Marxist
Literature — marxists.org, esp. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and Deng
98. Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
99. The Open
Society and Its Enemies (2 vols.) — Karl Popper
100. The Origins
of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil — Hannah Arendt
101. The
Argumentative Indian and
The Idea of Justice — Amartya Sen
102. The Cult of the Charkha — Rabindranath Tagore
103. Essentials of Hindutva — V. D. Savarkar
104. Hindu Political Thought: Liberal, Conservative
and Reactionary and Speech on Conservative Interpretation of Indic
Past using the Panchatantra — Ashay Naik
105. What is the
Real Sanatana Dharma? — V. D. Savarkar
106. The Saffron Swastika (2 vols.), Decolonizing
the Hindu Mind, Who is a Hindu?, Return of the Swastika, The Argumentative Hindu, Divinizing the Veda: The Problem of
Traditionalism, and Hindu Dharma and the Culture
Wars — Koenraad Elst
107. Final Version of the Chronological Gulf between the Old
Rigveda and the New Rigveda — Shrikant
Talageri
108. Kautiliya Arthashastra (3 vols.) — Kautilya
(Chanakya), trans. R. P. Kangle
