A couple of days ago I met a young bibliophile in Hyderabad who had read my blog and wanted to talk to me. During the course of the conversation which centred mostly on books by Indian authors I mentioned that I had been looking for books by Fakir Mohan Senapati. I had told him that I wasn’t able to find anything by Senapati till date. That was Tuesday I guess when I met this young man, and yesterday when I dropped in at the MR Book store at Punjagutta I saw ‘Six Acres and a Third’ by Fakir Mohan Senapati in one of the hundreds of books laid out on a table. I was delighted when I took it out of the pile and saw that it was a Penguin imprint. Though the price was two hundred rupees I did not want to leave it behind because I know it would be impossible to find this title at Abids in the near future.
This wasn’t the only book I found last week. On Sunday at Abids I found two more wonderful books. A considerable space in my bookshelves is filled with memoirs and autobiographies by well known writers. I somehow cannot resist buying such titles and the reason could be that I hope to find some bit of writing knowledge in their books that would help me become a better writer and help me complete my novel that I have been working at since more than a decade. On Sunday I found another such title by a writer whose books I had read a lot when I was young. I found ‘The Other Side of Me’ by Sidney Sheldon’ which was a hardcover copy though there were some moisture stains in some pages. On the whole it was in quite good condition and so I bought it. The seller asked for just fifty rupees for it which I paid him gladly.
It wasn’t at Abids that I found the second book but at Chikkadpally on the way home. I have a considerable number of titles on India and its recent past that have been written extensively on by writers like Sunil Khilnani, Pavan K. Varma, Shashi Tharoor and so on. For a long time I had been looking for something by Ramachandra Guha who writes intelligently on a lot of things happening in India and also about the country’s past. Luckily I saw his ‘India after Gandhi’ that turned out to be one big tome running into more than seven hundred pages. The size of the book was intimidating and I hesitated for a long time wondering whether I would be able to read a book of that size and length. For the first time the price wasn’t the deciding factor but the length of the book. Finally I decided to buy it since it was almost brand new and for the price at which I was getting it the deal was a steal.
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