“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
------------ Ray Bradbury


My father, Baburao Chitre, was a true bibliophile. Books were the only things he collected and amassed. As a result, my younger siblings and I grew up in the midst of cupboards and shelves full of books in several languages. Baburao purchased new as well as second-hand books. Many of them were different editions of the same book. He also had a formidable collection of reference books: dictionaries, encyclopaedias, atlases, and bound volumes of periodicals. Baroda, where I was born and raised till adolescence, was a princely state with a ruler who had a zeal for modernisation. The small city had excellent public libraries and museums that our father took us to visit. We were taught how to use a library at a very early age. We learnt how to learn on our own through books.