Aug 5, 2012

Why every entrepreneur should read Harry Potter


A quick question to start with – Have you read the Harry Potter books already? If yes, you will not need my help with the Potter jargon and you might as well find this post interesting, especially if you are an entrepreneur of some sorts, considering the angle in which I have tried to bring out this article. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it if you have the habit of reading and I can give you an assurance that it is not, as per the general perception of most non-readers, an over-rated childish story.



I always have a special feeling about Harry Potter and I just feel that the time has not come yet for it to be unanimously accepted by all reading community as a classic. This is a usual problem that many contemporaries face since the work would not have been time-tested yet. People would have even debated about the quality of Iliad or Ulysses or the Lord of the Rings series when they were initially published. As they withstood the test of time and passed on to our generations, we accept their classic status without a question and some even go on to stack them in the most inaccessible corners of our book shelves.

In my native language Tamil, I can draw the analogy of the most recent cult-classic- Kalki’s ‘Ponniyin Selvan’, which was initially published as a long and continuous story in a magazine that came every week. I can imagine how the story would have fascinated readers back then and made them waiting for the next edition of the magazine to catch the story’s next chapter. This is a fascinating story that made me sit and read about 2000 pages at one go in 3-4 days. I can see the pride in some old timers even now when they say that they read the Ponniyin Selvan in the magazine version and that pride emanates from being a contemporary witness to a classic in its creation stage. Many of them have even went on to name their kids after certain lead characters in Ponniyin Selvan. For all we know, we might be the generation that names their kids Harry, Albus or Severus* and speak proudly about the experience of waiting for the release of the next Potter book in the future.