A Rant

“Now, that is a smart move by Harper Collins”, I remarked. It definitely did catch my attention, the fact that the publishers/PR agency of the author had distributed the extract along with the newspapers.

A booklet slid out from one of the pages of the Newspaper the other morning and picking it up I thought it was a book about some locality in Calcutta. Saraswati Park it said. Mind went back to Anandnagar from the City of Joy, Dominique Lapierre 1985 epic novel about Calcutta and its economically backward section of the society. Anyways, turned out it was a booklet that had an extract from the new novel by Anjali Joseph called Saraswati Park and no, this was not about Calcutta but it was about Mumbai. A book with that kind of a boring, ‘down-market’, ‘un-intellectual and cryptic’ title – would have definitely escaped the attention of any random book buyer at the Crosswords and Landmarks of our country. But with this act of distributing the extract along with the newspapers, it was made as a book that would have a recall whenever one of the subscribers walked in to a book shop. Even better, some would have liked the extract and would have ended up buying the book.

That brings me to the woeful feeling I get whenever I have to step into a Crossword or a Landmark on a Saturday or a Sunday. The crowds in these book shops are actually a joke if you ask me. A closer look at the buying behavior of these bums will tell you that they are not there to buy any book but just to browse through the store. Most of them enter just to convince themselves that they too are intelligent people who read. They invariably would go around the store, look at some books, read the cover, place the book back and then continue meting out the same treatement to a dozen books. Then they walk up to the magazine rack and pick up an ‘Outlook’ or a ‘Business Today’ and make their way out of the shop. What a waste ! These folks are just people who are in the mall to roam around and hang out. But they feel its their duty to pay a visit to the book shop and invariably the book shop on a Sunday is full of such floaters. That is one of the reasons that I do not like going to buy books on these days. I prefer weekdays. That way you will have some quiet time to browse through the selection of books and maybe even end up looking at a fresh stock of books since the shop would have refreshed their stock after the weekend bonanza sale.

I know this because I go to the mall to catch a movie and my friends then make their way into the book shop in the mall. As if they have some title to pick up from the shop. But in most cases they either end up with nothing in their hands or a magazine like I described above. This quite funnily works in a different way too, since when these people see a crowd inside the book shop, they too end up visiting the store as they too want to be among the intelligentsia and not the ‘roam-around-the-mall’ crowd, so frequent on Sundays and Saturday evenings. The people who I used to meet in the store on Sundays were so poor in the knowledge of the books and authors, that I used to feel a bit let down. What with once a guy describing Chetan Bhagat as a Pulitzer Prize winner ! (with all due respect to his style). All this has built a firm repulsion towards visiting or even being 100 mtr. near to a bookshop on a weekend.

It's maybe hypocritical !