All I wanted to do was read a good book

Yesterday was a brilliant day in Mumbai, lazy Sunday afternoon, 35 degrees with 90 % humidity and no air conditioning in my apartment. What better to do than to go to the nearby air conditioned bookshop and savour some literary works. I went to Crossword, one of first and most famous bookstore chains, stepping in was a nice respite from the humid heat. Neatly stacked books everywhere. Usually I go to small book shops, tell them the books I want the voila! I am done shopping. Even with bookshop chains, I pretty much follow the same modus operandi. This was pretty much the first time I was there to "find" a good book to read, and off course observe people :)

Although it was a small store by floor area, I felt an acute need for a map. So before I could get lost, I started browsing randomly, the first section on display was "Latest Arrival", nice hard bounds and paperbacks neatly stacked. Just a glance through it enlightened me that the cost of Iraq war was 3 trillion dollar, there was some Indian princess who apparently had an extra marital affair with some Italian actor, there was some Templar/Gothic secret which was not deciphered for 800 years untill some 25 yr old professor from North Central Western University did it. I had an urge to write a book with title "The Reader is a jackass" and keep it there but then I thought maybe some off-season was going on in printing business, hence lets pass the section and move to regular favourites.

On the left came the Indian authors' section, I had always thought Indians had less exotic English, and it seems I was wrong always. The titles themselves were so cryptic as if they were carefully drafted to play the game "guess whats inside just by reading the title". Forgive me for being ignoramus but I really fail to understand whats there in the book titled "An Equal Music", or "The Interpreter of Maladies", but then again we are the people who are credited with world's longest poem. So I picked up 5 books randomly from the section, and skimmed through the pages and synopsis. Invariably all had some form of 1947, Bombay, Calcutta, Royalty etc., it seems all the Indian authors are just not ready to accept that India today and India yesterday are different, apart from Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta there are cities like Indore, Varanasi, Lucknow, Pune which house some good population of the country, and they are oblivious to pre independence royalty, adultery in south Bombay and nostalgia of Calcutta coffee house.

With some disappointment and a little hope, I moved away to western fiction section. Just like their Indian counterparts, they too suffer the problem of writing again and again about the same thing, I mean isn't there anything other than Lawyers, adultery, super rich, doctors and medieval Europe secret to write about? and to make it worst, there was a section at the bottom with little flower in the publishers' name, it was unmistakably Mills and Boons, the entire publishing is based on the idea of taking multiple type of people in the population and making them love each other one by one. One book had lawyer loving a doctor, other had banker loving a lawyer, then there was a cartoonist loving a nurse so and so forth, only there were no engineers to be found.

Briefly I glanced through the Health and cooking section, and I realised Tarla dalal had published as many books as the number of recipes known in an average household. Also there was a health magazine which had a tempting headline "your way to 6 packs in 6 weeks", now that is tempting..

Finally before I was about to give up, I landed up in Business books section, It is the most entertaining of all. Somehow I have noticed, business books and self help books are usually stacked together (off course with demarcation on segments), so there was a youngish guy reading "Men are from mars, Women are from Venus", poor guy, just out of a breakup..
There were the regulars there, which told me that there were some 10 things which millionaires did, there are some 15 ways by which I could become an investment super guru and what are the 20 things that made Toyota, Honda and Mitsubishi...and there was new league as well, a league of economists claiming that everything in the world is based on economics (=)) as if economics is a science), they could tell me who pays for my coffee by economics (genius!! I must say).

Finally I ended up in the Dilbert section, picked up the only book which I haven't read and ended the voyage. At the back of every penguin book their business inception idea is written, "all he wanted to do was to read a decent book" was the idea that led the founder of Penguin Books to open the company. That is exactly what I wanted to do, if only any publisher or author meant anything by this idea.

PS: I hold deep respect for all authors everywhere, it's just that I also hold deep respect for my inner cynic :)