Encounters at the World Book Fair

The World Book Fair is on in New Delhi right now and I have been paying visits to the event over the last 2 weeks. Its one of those events in Delhi which may not make it to a What’s Hot weekly calendar but is a definite on the to-do list of starved book lovers of the capital.

Its not that we don’t have books in Delhi. Au contraire the capital boasts of quite a few book stores with snazzy café’s attached. I have done the rounds of these and have discovered that the only ones worth frequenting are the owner-managed oldies like Fact and Fiction and Bahrison’s and a few others because if you are not looking for a self-help book or a collector’s edition of Sophie Kinsella or a compendium of puzzles for your pre-teen child or a 144-colour pack of crayons to satisfy your 6 year old’s palette requirements its not worth entering these bookshops.

You will definitely find, on entering, a sale-table with an array of obscure titles at attractive discounts ranging from war stories to badly edited children’s fables. The tote-carrying fashionistas who deign to stroll in here do not look beyond the latest chick-lit or Vogue and the moms who walk in make a beeline for the shelves with the “Improve Your Child’s Reading Skills” workbooks. So, you can guess, that if you would like to browse through a depth of titles, or even worse, are looking for a particular title shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 1992, the store assistant will be stumped and try to change your mind and make you buy the new issue of Man’s World instead. Its really a scandal – the scant attention bookstores pay to catering to the serious book reader. If you are not a management essay junkie, you will leave most of these stores with a bitter taste in the mouth, unless you made it worthwhile by sipping some of the coffee they serve.

To escape this Saharan situation, I do try to visit the book fair when it’s on, to buy and also to be in an atmosphere where there are millions of titles at your disposal; to browse through, smell, look lovingly at and feel relieved that these bound pages of print are not fully out of fashion.

While I had a great time this year doing all of the above, I did have some encounters of the third kind which reminded me that the fair was on in Delhi. These were the Zabar 10:

1. Fashionable college girl asking friend while looking at cover of worldwide bestseller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “Is this about that LA Ink girl on Travel & Living?” I must say that I felt proud that the youngsters of my city were at least making time for a Discovery franchised channel out of their hours of MTV Splitsvilla viewing.
2. Parents with pesky toddlers grumbling, “At least they could have a play area for the kids. Why can’t they learn from the malls?”
3. A distinguished senior citizen browsing through Canterbury Tales and mouthing the following on the phone, “So which schools have you applied for admission for Alina? …Ok I’ll check on the application status there.”
4. Crowds thronging the stall of a media house to get discounted subscriptions to the latest film glossies in a bundle-offer.
5. Britannica’s new school workbooks flying off the shelves as purposeful mummies stocked their bags of knowledge.
6. Ed Hardy clad young un muttering, “I want a good travel book as reference for my blog,” as he fingered Nehru’s Discovery Of India tentatively.
7. Friend enquiring on mobile while I am browsing, “So, do they have good books to buy there?” Huh? I pretended the call dropped.
8. Flummoxed Penguin staff looking for words as customer ranted, “Why isn’t Shobha De’s Spouse stocked under “Modern Classics”?
9. Flummoxed Penguin staff looking for words as customer asked politely,” So you are from Bangalore? What are the property prices there now?”
10. Screaming child trailing parents, “But I don’t want to buy BOOKS!”

I rest my case.