My wife and I visited a popular book fair in South Mumbai. The book sale was held in a large assembly hall where hundreds of thousands of books —fiction and nonfiction, paperbacks and hardbacks—were tightly stacked front to back with their spines up, in rows upon rows that stretched longer than bowling alleys.   The place was teeming with all kinds of readers, and perhaps even non-readers. There were book browsers casually flipping through titles, old-school readers savouring

There is a popular Zen story that is both revealing and inspiring for its clarity of thought and deeper meaning. One morning, two monks,...