For Kubbra Sait, the love for books wasn’t something she grew up with, but a habit she inculcated in herself as an adult. “I actually didn’t really grow up reading a lot of novels or books, and I never even thought growing up that maybe I will become an author one day. But that is something that I chose to do as an adult. Books came into my life through a conscious choice. It was something that I had to do like an exercise to imagine,” she says on World Book Day, adding that self help books became her comfort place.
Reflecting on some of her favourite works, Kubbra Sait shares, “I loved reading The 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, the work by Paulo Coelho and The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. It doesn’t matter how big or small the book is for me, as far as it connects, and I’m able to remember something while reading it, it works for me. I remember reading The White Tiger before watching the film and I loved it. I could picture Delhi while reading it and the next time I went back to the city, I was amused to see that the numbers in the houses were misaligned as it was mentioned in the book.”
Ask her about one book that changed her life and she shares, “The Artist’s Way is an amazing book. It is like a functional workbook and it’s such a gift. I started doing this during the pandemic as an exercise and it’s one of the most incredible books that you will read and follow. That book changed my life.”
It’s this fascination that even led her to write her own memoir. “I realised that I had a flair with words, and a different way of looking at the world. This is my way of expression, and I expressed it through books. The idea should be the expansion of your mind whichever way you choose to do it. That’s something that gives you the feeling of being alive,” she says, adding, “There was no better way to put myself out there. The way I understand life today, I don’t think I would have been able to understand it that way if I hadn’t written about it. Writing my memoir has given me the courage to whole heartedly live the rest of my life. It has just opened the pathway, of whatever is and whatever is to come because the past does not hold me anymore,” she says.
Kubbra’s current read is something she feels is a necessity in today’s time as it’s about hope and unity. “There is this book that I absolutely love, it’s called Humankind. I go back to this book over and over again. It talks about these different incidents in different parts of the world, where the human kind actually came together in support of each other. In the world that we see today, where humanity is against each other in ideologies, thoughts, spirit and in action, the book shows that in any adversity, we will all eventually come together. I happened to read that book during the pandemic and it was nothing less truer than what was happening during that time,” she ends.
