Representative image
Credit: DH Photo
Almost all my working life, bookshops have held a special fascination for me. Whichever city I found myself in, whether in Bhubaneswar, where I bought my first book, George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Prefaces, or Ooty, where science fiction caught my fancy, or New Delhi, where I picked up a hardbound edition of Le Carre’s Smiley’s People at a hefty discount, I never could walk into a bookshop and not come back with a book.
In Kolkata, one frequented Oxford Book Store on Park Street (a library cum bookshop) or the really tiny street-side bookshops in front of Metro Cinema on Chowringhee (from where I picked up my copy of Subramanyam Chandrasekhar’s Truth and Beauty). I also bought the first book for my daughter, a large book full of pictures at the Calcutta Airport bookshop way back in 1988, when she was all of three years old.
Once I moved to Bengaluru, the bookshops I used to haunt were the late Murthy sir’s Select off Brigade Road and Shanbaug’s Premier Book Shop on Museum Road. Murthy once fished out a special edition of Scientific American, which was a compilation of seminal articles on cosmology, including one on the discovery of tectonic plates and the continental shift, which, the editors explained, was connected to cosmology, a connection that is becoming more and more relevant today, thanks to advances in astrobiology.
As for Shanbaug of Premier, he once gingerly extracted and proffered me, from one of the many teetering multi-storeyed stacks, a book titled Hindu Myth, Hindu History by Heinrich von Stietencron, an author whom I had not heard of until then. The book proved to be a scholarly work, and I lapped it up! I have since lent this book and recommended it to many of my friends. Strand in Manipal Centre was another bookshop that had some fantastic books on science and mathematics. I owe my copy of G H Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology to this place. I even found a good book, Jayant Narlikar’s The Scientific Edge, in a bookshop in a five-star hotel—the Taj Residency in Bengaluru.
Most of these places have long since vanished, and most bookshops today are places that lack character. The odd, good book is tucked away in a remote shelf, and there is no one there to fish it out for you.
For me, a sign of things to come happened way back in 1995 in Allahabad, where I had gone on some work for the organisation I worked for those days. As is my wont, I wandered to the local bookshop in the evening, where I found Steven Weinberg’s classic The First Three Minutes. As I went to the cash counter clutching the book lovingly, I overheard the owner, an old man, telling his friend, “I fear there will be no one to look after this place once I am gone.”