In an earlier post I had written that in Hyderabad book readings take place either at the bookstores or fancy hotels like the Grand Kakatiya. But yesterday I attended one that was held in an art gallery. After I read in ‘The Hindu’ that Askshara Books and Penguin India were organising a book reading of Bernard Imhasly’s ‘Goodbye to Gandhi? Travels in New India’, I decided to attend. There’s nothing like being among people who love to read. The book reading was at Kalakriti Art Gallery at Road No. 10, Banjara Hills and it took me quite some time to locate it.
It was also the first time I ever stepped into an art gallery. There was a show going on and I looked at the paintings displayed on the walls. There was time for the reading to start so I looked up the works of a female artist who had a sense of humor. The gallery wasn’t very huge but had enough space for about forty or fifty plastic chairs. The place filled up slowly with the book lovers trickling in. On most occasions one gets to see the same faces again and again but today there were new faces.
Though I normally don’t read such high brow stuff I picked up this book because it is a sort of travel book. Bernard Imhasly, the blurb says, is a linguist and anthropologist by profession and was the South Asia correspondent for several European newspapers in the nineties. He was also in the Swiss Foreign Service and was posted in India. The book is 195 pages long and is priced at Rs. 425, though I got the book at a discount, for Rs. 350, one of the advantages of attending such book readings. While waiting for the reading to begin, I flipped through the book and found a chapter on Hyderabad, rather, Cyberabad. The author read out a few passages from the book and answered questions from the audience as well as the moderator, Jyotirmoy. The questions ranged from the rigid attitude of idealists, Gandhi versus Nehru, how the author chose or not choose the people who he interviewed. It was a brief but interesting event in an unusual location.
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