The Sunday Haul ( on 03-04-2016)

At last after three consecutive Sundays of having had to go to work I had all of a Sunday free. I had the whole of Sunday to myself to do anything I wanted. What I wanted most was to go to Abids in the morning and browse leisurely on the pavements strewn with thousands of books and try to find at least one good title. Last Sunday it may have been the hottest one so far and which prevented me from browsing for more than a couple of hours at Abids. It was so hot with the sun blazing fiercely as early as at eleven in the morning that despite wearing a cap I tried to keep myself in the shade for as long as possible. Though it was pretty hot I was glad I came because I ended up with a decent haul of five good titles.

I had first come across Roland Barthes’s name a long time back while reading an article about fountain pens. Somehow I made no serious attempt to know who Roland Barthes was, or about what he wrote even though I knew he was a writer. Now I have an opportunity to know all about Barthes because the first book I found at Abids last Sunday was ‘A Roland Barthes Reader’ edited by Susan Sontag. After I spotted and picked it up to take a closer look at the contents I felt flattered when the seller told me that he was waiting for me to pick it up. However he did not budge even an inch from the price of Rs 200 that he quoted for it. Of course, I bought it.

A long time back, maybe in the early years of 2000 I was going through a long period of self-doubt and terrible anxiety. Later I realized that I had been depressed but luckily I learnt about ‘Transcendental Meditation’ that helped me bounce back to almost normalcy. I still practice TM and also have an interest and curiosity about various forms of meditation. Recently I found Shunryu Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ that I am rereading for the third time. So when I saw a beautiful copy of ‘The Miracle of Mindfulness- A Manual on Meditation’ by Thich Nhat Hanh I bought it.

After soul food it was time for some real food. At another seller I found another beautiful copy of ‘Hot & Spicy’ by Charmaine Solomon that I felt I should not let go. Inside were scores of recipes on glossy pages with beautiful photographs of mouth water dishes. Another find was yet another small but glossy book- Sanjeev Kapoor’s ‘Kitchen Secrets- Breakfast’ that I got pretty cheap. But the real find was a copy of ‘Best Food Writing 2000’ edited by Holly Hughes. It had fifty one essays on food, cooking, ingredients, restaurants, and so on by various writers among which I could recognize only Madhur Jaffrey, Anthony Bourdain, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Ruhlman.
That was the mixed haul that I found at Abids last Sunday.