Interviewer: Books that interested you when…
you were young.
Sadhguru: Jules Verne - that octopus thing I read when I was in 3rd standard.
I think that was one of the first books,
probably when I was in 3rd, 4th standard, which freaked me out.
I mean, he exaggerated everything.
There's no such octopus in the world.
He imagined such a big octopus,
which would come and pull down us... whole, you know, like an ocean liner, and
all that kind of stuff.
I think I was in my 3rd or 4th standard, when it so freaked my imagination.
This octopus, and me wanting to go to the sea,
and want to see these octopuses, and whatever else, all those other things that go with it.
I think for almost 6 months, 8 months, this...
octopuses crawled through my brains.
That's one book that really grabbed my imagination.
The next big book that grabbed my imagination was 'Gulliver's Travels.'
I wanted to go to those islands, and meet those little people, and...
kick them around a little bit, and... just the idea, because
when you're… when you are seven, eight,
you're a bloody Lilliput in the world, everybody's taller than you,
and everybody thinks he's adult, and everybody...
'cause I could think like them, I could feel like them, but
they always thought you're a Lilliput.
So I wanted to go to that island, and meet these really little ones and...
kick them around a little bit, as they were doing - adults were doing to me.
(Laughs)
So 'Gulliver's Travels' really did that.
And okay, the other big one…
all these going to the sea books somehow fascinated me.
'Robinson Crusoe' just freaked me out.
I really wanted to go away. When we were in 9th standard,
me and my friends planned, we'll build a craft, and we will go up to Tahiti.
We wanted to just go away… three-four of us, we wanted to build a boat, and...
sail away to Tahiti.
We studied the ocean currents, how to go,
which season to take off to the ocean, the works.
There's another movie, I don't know, one Captain…
there used to be lot of English movies at that time
where kids run off to the ocean, you know, as...
what do you call them – stowaways.
As a stowaway, you go away in a ship -
all these stories caught my imagination so much,
always we were chanting, 'If you run, you must run to the sea, you must run to the sea.' (Chuckles)
We never ran, fortunately. (Chuckles)
We almost ran, but we didn't run. (Laughs)
Robinson Crusoe, and later on, it's still fascinated me that
island getting lost thing was… what is this?...
Ibsen's Crichton, what is it,
Cri... Admirable Crichton!
So here, a whole English family, in the Victorian age,
they go on a ship, and they crash, and they get lost on an island.
So suddenly, the whole life gets reversed.
These English dandies can't survive on an island.
They don't know anything, how to do anything, they can't...
They don't even know how to strike a matchbox.
So slowly, this… Crichton is a cook,
slowly, cook gradually becomes the leader,
and this… this aristocrat becomes a buffoon on the island.
This Crichton marries one of the daughters… Interviewer: Ah!
Sadhguru: Yeah, because they are there for many years.
The whole society gets reversed;
the lowest becomes the highest, and the highest become the lowest,
because the conditions have changed from England.
And after some 8 or 10 years, one day a ship comes,
and they don't know what to do, because now... the cook has become the boss.
Suddenly if the ship comes, everything will get reversed again. (Laughs)
But Crichton says, "This is a natural order of society.
There, that was the order; here, this is the order.
If you go back to England, once again, that's the order."
So he sets up a smoke signal.
Ship comes and picks them up, and then they come back to England,
and once again, Crichton becomes a cook.
And suddenly the dandy feels so uncomfortable,
'cause all these days he was a buffoon,
who was good for nothing, and suddenly he is the boss now.
And they all invent stories,
how they survived on the island, and how they did wonderful things,
and Crichton won't say one word, for everything he says, 'Yes Sir.'
He again becomes a butler in their family, so that's 'The Admirable Crichton'.
In highschool, one book I read was the ah...
'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' Have you read that? Richard Bach?
In about a month, I read about 23 times, this book. And it really freaked me.
I read 'Illusions' also many times.
Khalil Gibran's what... ah... 'Prophet'
really struck a chord in me.
More than that, Mikhail Naimy's 'The book of Mirdad.'
Oh, that was wonderful!
These all, I read them when I was, you know, somewhere between 20 to 24,
which all piled up in me in a big way, one on top of the other.
Moby Dick really freaked me.
That's a book that still rules my mind, one way or the other.
That's about a whale, again, sea, you know... (Interviewer laughs)
And Tolstoy was, really... it affected me
quite a lot - Dostoevsky and Tolstoy -
that made a big, big impact on me.
Interviewer: Have you read 'War and Peace'? Sadhguru: Yeah, yeah.
I've read almost all the books of Tolstoy.
They were all Russian books, and available at 2 rupees, 3 rupees,
I bought up a whole library of Russian books, and read them up.
Interviewer: In what way books transcend our life ?
Sadhguru: They don't transcend.
It is just that, if the author is ah...
very insightful,
to... live life as everybody lives, it would take 1000 years for you.
But in those 2 days, when you read a 500-page book,
which goes into somebody's life intricately,
ah... you actually live through that, without actually having to go through all that.