Luck by Chance

In Bangalore , while walking on the roads, one may frequently see a small stand selling some secondhand books. The easiest way to identify the book crazy fanatics are the ones who leave the Chetan Bhagat, the Deepak Chopra books and rummage through the older second hand books on the offhand chance of finding that elusive book which they have been searching for a long time. Even with the ability to buy it firsthand off Amazon or Flipkart, the average fanatical reader will rummage through dozens of such sales, not just in Bangalore but in most of the other cities of our country.

Second Hand Books - A heap of unknown treasures

What I really remember about such places, be it Daryaganj in Delhi, College Street in Kolkata or Moor Market ( once upon a time ) in Chennai, was the atmosphere. As a kid, I recall that odd smell – a mix of old books, food and sweat as people bargained with traders over a 10 bucks to get that book or textbook they were searching for. At one end, you had a stack of Reader’s Digest issues sorted with a bunch of Competition Success Review magazines and Malayalam Manorama. Frequently, we would find a book which we had never expected to find of. Sometimes, we were even luckier to glance across an author we had never read before, but who opened the doors to a new series of books.

With Amazon,Flipkart, Apple iBooks and other online commerce sites, I do not get that opportunity to get lucky. Without a clear idea of the author or the book, searching through the huge database is meaningless and tiring. What makes it worse is that unlike the bookstores , where you have fellow readers or bookstore owners to provide suggestions , here one is left to trawl the huge corridors of cyberspace, hoping to find something which catches your eye. Even if one does find such a book online, it rarely matches the joy of finding it in a bookstore and bargaining for a deal.

To end, I will just leave you with this beautiful time lapse video,

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