Santhy Balachandran Instagram – Every year, I go through a couple of intense bouts of reading when all I care to do is immerse myself in the pages of a book. I read furiously and feverishly. I am drunk with pleasure and power, intoxicated by the hubris of being a collaborator to the author — giving final touches to the worlds they have painstakingly created, the faces and places they have bled into existence. And then comes the lull. My books wind up stacked carelessly on top of each other, gathering dust on unreachable shelves, becoming a playground for insects of all kinds. During these months of neglect, I can barely stand to look at them. The guilt of having spent money on tomes I may never read pricks me every time my eyes wander to my shelves. And then there’s mild panic; fear that I maybe cheating myself of some sliver of insight into the human condition by ignoring a classic I already own — forget the ones on my ever expanding wish lists. I can never predict when these phases will switch. For now, my books wait. Patiently. Sans judgement. And I take to browsing through titles in secondhand shops, in the hope that one of them will break the spell, open up portals to new worlds again.