It was a sombre Sunday morning as I woke up to the news of the bombings in Iran. Somehow it was all very disturbing and so in that mood I set out for Abids not really wishing to find anything. I went there just out of habit. It wasn't too hot though we are already in March. Also in the news was the forecast by the weather department that it was going to be a very, very hot summer over here.
As usual I began with the sellers in Chikkadpally and the first title in the Sunday haul was a hardcover copy of 'India: Social Structure' by M.N. Srinivas that I got for fifty rupees. It is previously published as the first chapter in Gazeteer of India.
Then at Abids a book with a bright red cover caught my eye. It was a copy of 'Red Star Over India' by Jan Myrdal. The book is an analysis of the Naxalite movement in India by Jan Myrdal who is a Swedish author, leftist-political writer and columnist according to the bio on the back cover of the book. I bought it for the cover alone.
Further on I found a copy of Diary of a Malayali Madman by N. Prabhakaran Tr. Jayasree Kalathil. I haven't heard about Prabhakaran earlier and was curious to know more about the novel and also the author. I got it for a hundred rupees.
Then the next find was a most interesting title. Only the previous day I was going through my notebooks while working on a writing project. In a notebook I maintained in 1998 I had read about the National Seminar on Travel Writing that I had attended in March 1998 at the University of Hyderabad. I had gone there to listen to Bill Aitken whose books I had read a couple of months earlier. At this session one of the coordinators was Sachidananda Mohanty, the academic. Incidentally the book I found last Sunday 'Travel Writing and the Empire' ed Sachidananda Mohanty was a product of the proceedings of the seminar. I was surprised to read that the Seminar was held in 1999 when in fact it was in 1998. I don't know how they got it wrong.
But the most interesting title of the day was the slim copy of 'Life and Learning' that I spotted with a seller near Bata. on the cover was a shelf of book that caught my attention. It was a textbook meant for the I Year UG Bcom/BCom/BBA students of Karnatak University according to the blurb on the back cover. It had some wonderful essays and poems. I was quite excited to find it also had an extract from 'Decolonising the Mind' by Ngugi wa Thiong' O that I had been trying to find since a long time. This slim and lovely copy with wonderful print was by Orient Blackswan
