FRIDAY DOUBLE POST- THE SUNDAY HAUL- POST NO. 2

It is infinitely better to stop resolving about not buying any more books because I simply cannot do it. I have to buy the books I come across and that which make me restless if I do not buy them. It makes me far relaxed now that I have decided to keep continuing buying the books I find at Abids and other second hand book stores. Otherwise it took me infinite will power to look at a book I wanted to read without buying it. In this easy frame of mind I made my weekly Sunday trip to Abids and ended up buying three fantastic titles.

A couple of weeks ago I read a book that I had picked up on a hunch at Abids for just ten rupees. It was Charles McCarry’s ‘The Tears of Autumn’ and reading which made me wonder how I had missed not knowing this wonderful writer. I decided to buy any title of his that I happened to come across though it appeared remote. But luckily I saw ‘The Better Angels’ at a second hand bookstore in Begumpet. Though I wanted to buy it right away I did not do so. One reason I did not buy it immediately was the resolution at the back of my mind about not buying whatever books I happened to see and like, and the second reason was that even if I wanted to buy the book, I did not wish to spend a hundred rupees buying it when I could buy the same book at Abids at a quarter of the price.

Lucky guy that I am, last Sunday, I found this very title in a heap of books selling for only twenty rupees. It was a decent enough copy, decent enough to make me forget about the copy I saw in the bookstore. I am eager to read it as soon as I get the time because ‘The Tears of Autumn’ was one damn exciting book.

The next find of Sunday was ‘The Penguin Book of English Short Stories’ that I had seen last Sunday and had not bought due to the same reasons I mentioned above. I got the book for eighty rupees, twenty rupees less than the price the seller had scribbled on the back cover. There are sixteen stories by writers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Maugham, James Joyce and all the other great writers of that time. This adds to my growing collection of short story titles which is growing at the rate of one title a month. Earlier this month I had found Graham Greene’s ‘Twenty One Stories’ and now this title.

The last and third find of Sunday was an absolute beauty. I found Raymond Chandler’s ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ that I had bought at the Hyderabad Book Fair in 2012. I got this copy on Sunday at just sixty rupees. In 2012 too I got a better copy at the same price.

Incidentally, I met Jai and his friend at Abids while going around looking for books to pick up. We five (me, Uma, Srikanth) sat in an Irani and had chai. We talked about books, fountain pens, and also watches, things around which most of our lives revolve, awake or in sleep.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s death last week was a dampener and the wonderful writer that he was, he richly deserved all the praise that filled the pages of almost every newspaper I read. However, another writer’s death went completely unnoticed because he remains unknown to a large number of people though he is a fantastic writer. A couple of days after Marquez’s death I came across a small news item announcing the death of Alistair MacLeod. I had discovered Alistair MacLeod’s only recently and it was totally by accident that I found his book of short stories- ‘Island’- that I spotted at the Best Books sale sometime last year. Incredibly enough, shortly afterwards I found another famous collection of his short stories- ‘The Lost Salt Gift of Blood’- at Abids for just ten rupees. Unfortunately, I did not buy his novel ‘No Great Mischief’ that was also on the shelf for some reason. Now I realize I had been dumb not have bought it.

Alistair MacLeod’s stories are unforgettable and I am very pleased with myself for having unearthed this wonderful writer on my own. However, his death is an enormous loss. If you ever come across any of his books then do not miss buying them.

FRIDAY DOUBLE POST- 2014 TRIPS- Trip No. 4- To Tirupati Again

Ordinarily nothing exciting or even interesting happens at work in the lives of those in the Government. But occasionally, there will be something that will put in a bit of excitement though transient, for those, like me, who are lucky. If not anything else I am travelling very often making a trip a month, usually to Delhi. But sometimes I get to travel to a different place, like Bengaluru, Bubaneshwar and also Tirupati. Sometime in 2012 I guess I went to Tirupati on an official visit and incidentally had darshan at the famed Temple of Balaji in Tirumala.

Only a couple of weeks before, in the first week of this month, I had made a trip to Tirupati with my family for the darshan. While the train was moving out of the station at Tirupati I had the same thought that everyone who visits Tirumala has, that is, when the next trip would be. Even before a month has passed I got a chance to visit Tirupati again, this time on an official visit. I was accompanying a team of officials of the Government of India. Because of the importance of the visit the team was accorded State Guest status which meant that they would be accorded many privileges not available to others. Naturally, some of the privileges extended to those following them and I was one of those in the retinue.

After the meeting at Tirupati on Monday afternoon we went up the hills to Tirumala. I got a large room for myself at a nice guest house on the top. Since we had to get up at around one a.m. in the night in order to have an early morning darshan, I went to bed early. At 2-30 am we entered into the temple and were taken to the inner temple in such an incredibly short time. This normally takes hours and I felt lucky to have made it in a matter of minutes. The luckiest thing was that I was able to stand in the Sanctum Sanctorum for a full five minutes having a wonderful darshan that others only can dream about. In 2006 too while I was posted in the Vigilance Department I got a similar opportunity. At this early hour, the attendants in the temple are relaxed and in no hurry to shoo off the people like they do in the rest of the day. In fact, one of the attendants asked me to move closer to have a better darshan of the deity. Darshan over, we rushed to the airport to catch the flight back to Hyderabad.

This was one dream trip I am unlikely to forget.

The Sunday Haul

After missing my usual visit to Abids the Sunday before last I could make it this Sunday. Though I was not entirely successful in my resolve not to buy any more books I could limit my picks to just one book. Sometime back I had read ‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’ by Harold Robbins that I had somehow not read back in the eighties when I first started reading such books. There are a couple more HR titles I have yet to read. So when I came across a title that I had not been aware of I took it. It was ‘The Fence.’ The cover made it appear like it must be one of the original editions published sometime in the seventies. I was right and it turned out to be a first printing published in 1975. The artwork on the cover gave that look of the seventies. I got it for just thirty rupees. This was the only book I bought on Sunday.

But strangely enough, I am not able to find any mention of this book- The Fence- on the net. I keep coming across ‘Hopping the Fence’ but not ‘The Fence’ which is quite intriguing. I have a copy of the actual book but there’s no mention of it anywhere which is making me wonder if this title is some kind of a rare title or unknown title. There has to be more to this story and I promise I will keep looking for more about this title until I know the truth.

Monday too was a holiday so I felt like going to a bookstore. On my last visit to MR Books somewhere in Begumpet I had noticed that they had a new collection. In fact all the books I had bought recently were from this store. On Moday I saw ‘Best American Essays, 2005’ and felt like buying it. It had twenty five essays by writers like Edward Hoagland, David Sedaris, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Ian Frazier, Oliver Sacks, names I have come across earlier, and also by some writers I am not familiar with. It was at an unbelievable price of Rs 50 only which is something pretty unusual in a second hand bookstore.

FRIDAY DOUBLE POST: POST NO. 2- The Recent Haul

Last Sunday too I couldn’t go to Abids. After returning from Tirupati on Friday morning I had been feeling a bit under the weather. Since I had to leave for Delhi later in the evening on Sunday I did not want to be out in the hot sun at Abids for a couple of hours. As I had already decided I would be skipping the visit to Abids on Sunday I went to a bookstore- MR- at Begumpet to check out if there was anything I could find.

There was a new lot of books at MR which I had seen on my last visit. During this visit I found a brand new copy of ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe and Annie Dillard’s ‘Living By Fiction’ that was also in a good condition. Surprisingly, each book was priced at fifty rupees only which is less than what these books sell at Abids.

Then at Delhi, at Janpath, I bought a new copy of Chinua Achebe’s ‘Never At Ease’ which was a slim volume of just hundred and thirty six pages. I had nothing to read on the plane journey to Hyderabad so I picked it up. Later I went to Nehru Place, where in Nanda Bookstore I found Oliver Sacks’ ‘Musicophilia’ that I got for a hundred rupees. I also saw ‘ An Atlas of Impossible Longing’ by Anuradha Roy which I now feel I should have bought instead of ‘Musicophilia.’

FRIDAY DOUBLE POST: POST NO. 1- 2014 TRIPS- TRIP NOs 2 & 3

TRIP NO. 2- TIRUPATI AGAIN

In the last week I made two back to back trips. My second trip of the year was a personal trip with family to Tirupati. As usual we opted for the one day package of IRCTC which we find to be perfectly suitable for us as it takes care of train reservation, accommodation, darshan, transport and even food. On this trip however we faced a few problems. The train was three hours late and reached Tirupati at nine in the morning instead of six. This delay affected the entire program. It took us more than three hours to come out of the temple after darshan. We had lunch at half past four. I felt nauseous sitting in the back of the Tata Sumo coming down the ghat road, something that had never happened to me before. However, we were able to catch the train for the journey back home.

TRIP NO. 3- ANOTHER DELHI TRIP

Two days later I was off to Delhi again for the second time this year. Exactly a month ago, I was in Delhi to attend a workshop and on the same dates there was another workshop I was told to attend. I was reluctant to go but I agreed because there was a personal matter I had to deal with. I wanted to go because I wanted to meet and console a friend who lost his young son to cancer. The workshop was on Monday and I sat through it listening to the various speakers. Afterwards I went to Nehru Place to Nanda Bookstore to check if there was anything I could find worth buying. I bought a new copy of ‘Musicophilia’ by Oliver Sacks. I had finished reading ‘Red Leaves’ by Robert H Cook on the plane while coming to Delhi and had nothing to read on the way home. I bought ‘Never at Ease’ with the idea of reading it on the way back home. Earlier at Janpath I had bought a new copy of ‘ Never at Ease’ by Chinua Achebe that I read on the way back home.

Every parent’s worst nightmare is losing a child. It is very difficult to imagine how someone whose child dies feels. It is more difficult to console such parents. A day after the workshop when I met BN who was my friend in college while doing my post-graduation, I couldn’t hold back my tears. It was gut-wrenching to listen to him tell about the ordeal that the family went through watching the boy’s life fade away before their eyes after numerous sessions of chemotherapy. I felt miserable that no one could do anything to save the life of the child. I did not know what to tell my friend. My heart felt empty like it had a hole from which every feeling had gone.

The Sunday Haul

When I resolved not to visit Abids for a month or so in order not to add to the clutter of books at home I thought I would be able to hold on to this resolution. I stuck to this decision with great difficulty for exactly two weeks. Last Sunday I started to feel some kind of withdrawal symptoms. I missed being at Abids, missed looking at all the thousands of titles laid out on the pavements waiting for someone to pick them up, missed the usual Sunday banter with my friends at the cafe drinking chai. I missed it all. So last Sunday I decided to go but with a caveat that I would not pick up even a single book. However, it was not to be so because I bought three books, title that I couldn’t help buying.

Sometime back I had picked up a book on a hunch that was proved to be correct. After I read ‘The Tears of Autumn’ by Charles McCarry I felt like patting myself on the back for having picked up such a good book without knowing anything about the author or the title. So when I saw Dan Waddell’s ‘Blood Atonement’ on the pavement it did not take long for me to pick it up. That it was a Penguin title helped a bit but it was more my intuition that it would be an interesting read that made me pick it up.
The next find was another Penguin title, a King Penguin. I found a good copy of an old edition of RK Narayan’s classic ‘The Man Eater of Malgudi’ and got it for only thirty rupees. This was the first book I read in my life. I was maybe twelve years old when I found this book in my uncle’s bookshelf. I think I finished reading it in one day and since then I was hooked on books. Later I found all books of RK Narayan and read them one by one. I do not have a copy of ‘The Man Eater of Malgudi’ so finding this copy at Abids last Sunday was special.

The third title I found also was a Penguin title. On Sunday I came across a pretty decent copy of Dom Moraes’ autobiography ‘My Son’s Father’ that I got quite cheap. I paid only thirty rupees for it. I plan to read it one of these days. It is a perfect way to know more about Dom Moraes one of India’s famous poets/ journalists and a much honoured one at that.

Friday Twin Post- The Talk at Oakridge and The Sunday Haul

The Talk at Oakridge

After the presentation at New Delhi to a group of the country’s top meteorological big shots and others earlier in the month, I give another presentation to an entirely different bunch of little people last week. I gave a talk on natural calamities to students of sixth standard at Oakridge International School last Thursday. It was an entirely different experience for me since so far no audience at my talks or presentation had been 10-11 year old school kids.

Normally I have a standard power point presentation that I use at my talks at various places. But since this audience was different I had to modify it accordingly. Usually disaster management is a dry subject and a vast one at that. I had only forty five minutes to finish my talk so I thought it would be better if I told the kids about a natural calamity that is as dramatic as it is devastating. I chose to tell them about cyclones.

The forty five minutes flew by. The kids were so enthusiastic and asked so many questions I found it a bit difficult to answer all of them. There were about twenty five kids and out of them a few were more enthusiastic than the others and kept up a barrage of questions. I felt happy that I had told them something that I knew and I hope they also learnt something from my talk. It was a wonderful experience.

The Sunday Haul

Since I had barred myself from going to Abids on Sunday I stopped at Chikkadpally while returning home from some errand. I found Shashi Deshpande’s ‘That Long Silence’ that I got for thirty five rupees. It had a nice cover and was in good condition. Though I had bought ‘The Binding Vine’ a couple of months ago I haven’t found the time to read it. Someday soon I plan to read these two books since I have not read anything by Shashi Deshpande so far.

The Sunday Haul

Last Saturday I decided that I wouldn’t go to Abids since I had far too many books at home and did not want to add any more to that pile. My list of books to be read is growing longer by the day with the addition of an average of four or five books every week and hence this decision. On Sunday I stayed put at home fighting off the urge to rush to Abids. For some time I vacillated telling myself that I’d just go to only look at the books and not buy. I managed to control this urge until four in the afternoon. But suddenly I found it quite difficult to stay at home without even looking at the books on sale at Abids. However, true to my resolve, I did not go to Abids. I went up to Chikkadpally only.

At the first seller I stopped to browse at Chikkadpally I saw four brand new copies of titles I did not have the heart to leave alone. When I asked for the price I was told they cost five hundred rupees. The price was too steep and unaffordable and I told myself that I’d buy only two titles and not more. It was a struggle not succumbing to the urge to buy all the four titles. Finally, I ended up buying only two titles. The first title was the O.Henry/Pen Prize Stories, 2012 which was a welcome addition to my growing collection of short story titles. It had twenty stories including one by Alice Munro.

The second title I bought was a book by a writer I had not heard of before. The title was ‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell. The copies I found were so brand new that they could have come straight from the printers. I felt glad I came to Chikkadpally and found these two titles. I also felt a bit disappointed that I couldn’t buy the other two titles- Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ and Toni Morrison’s ‘Home’ that also looked good and were in the same condition as the two books I had bought. I was particularly pleased with the Pen/ O.Henry Prize stories. This collection not only has twenty stories but also essays by the jurors on their favourite stories and also something by the winners. I do not know when to start reading it since there are too many books I have to read.

FRIDAY DOUBLE POST- POST- 2/2; THE SUNDAY HAUL

One reason why I cut my trip to Delhi short by a day was that I did not want to miss my Sunday routine which includes sitting in an Irani cafe near home and reading the Sunday papers leisurely over a cup of steaming hot tea while entertaining thoughts very different from those I get on weekdays such as planning a trip or even writing another book and so on. The most important part of my Sunday routine is the visit to Abids to look for books on the pavements which is something I wouldn’t miss for anything in the world. So I arrived home late on Saturday night and by the time I went to bed it was past midnight but I went to bed smug in the knowledge that in the morning I would be at Abids.

On Sunday morning I set out for Abids filled with anticipation and excitement at the thought of finding some really good titles as always and also filled with half dread about how many books I would find that I have to carry back home. Mercifully there was only one title I saw fit to pick up and bring home. I have read most titles of Stephen King except a handful such as Misery that I found. I got it for thirty rupees only and planned to read it soon since the story is about a writer who suffers at the hands of a crazy fan.

Yesterday I happened to drop in at the Best Book Centre bookstore in Lakdikapul where I found a book I had missed twice. I first saw ‘Desert Shadows’by Anand (P. Satchidanandan), a Sahitya Akademi award winning title at the same store sometime last year. Though it was a Penguin title I did not buy it thinking it would be around for some time. When I went there a couple of weeks later it wasn’t there and I was disappointed. But when I saw the same book at Blossoms at Bengaluru last August again I missed buying it since by then I had picked up quite a few books and couldn’t afford to buy another. After I got back to Hyderabad I regretted not buying it at Bengaluru also. But when I saw it yesterday I grabbed it.

FRIDAY DOUBLE POST: POST-1/2; 2014 Trips: Trip No. 1- Another Trip to Delhi

My first trip of the year and one that came after a gap of almost five months was once again to the only place I go to half willingly- New Delhi. All my trips to Delhi have been official with the purpose of attending some meeting or seeing someone important and hence weren’t anxiety inducing. But this trip last week was no ordinary one since I was going to attend a two day workshop that was supposed to be chaired by the Cabinet Secretary himself. This alone was enough to make me sweat all over because the Cabinet Secretary is the top bureaucrat in the country. I had prepared a presentation at the last minute after I came to know that a Collector who was supposed to have come wasn’t making it to the workshop.

On Friday I landed at the venue near Lodhi Garden quite early to check out what the facilities were and reaching before everyone does gives you an idea who is coming and what is expected. Looking at the participants streaming in made me even more nervous because almost all of them were elderly gentlemen wearing suits and ties. I was one of the very few people in a simple dress sans tie or anything. My anxiety was further compounded at the time of the introductions when almost everyone turned out to be either Professor So So or Dr XYZ. They were all Directors or Heads of top institutions in the country and a couple of them turned out to be Vice Chancellors. This was the crowd I had to address and that thought made me wonder why I had agreed to make this trip. My anxiety lessened when the Cabinet Secretary departed after the tea break. Surprisingly, I was calm and when my turn came to speak I think I made a pretty impressive presentation.

I was relieved that my presentation went off without any problem though I felt my mouth dry up at the beginning. Afterwards I relaxed and looked at all the stuff they gave us. If one attends top-drawer workshops like this then one gets top-drawer stuff to take home. Everyone got a beautiful bag with the sort of notebook that I usually carry around to jot down stuff but what took the cake was another item. Usually one gets dinky pens along with a notebook and a plastic folder at such workshops but here I got not one pen but two pens and those too in a box. After the workshop ended on the first day I came into more pens.

I called up a friend who was my room-mate during my stay at Port Blair back in 2006. Rahul Dixit was just an intern at the NGO there when I joined him and now, after about eight years he has come a long way. Rahul came in his car to pick me up and we both went to Hauz Khas where I planned to check out Vandana Book Store in the Aurobindo Market. I had read about it long back and recently I was able to dig out the address. After a long chat with Rahul I went to Vandana and found they had Sheaffer fountain pens that they called the ‘No Nonsense’ model. They were light weight, good to hold and came cheap at Rs 250 each. I bought three of them, two for myself and one I gave to my brother. I thought I could fill ink straight away into the barrel since the pen did not have a filling system. But the pen started to leak so when I got to Hyderabad I went to Deccan Pen Stores in Secunderabad and got a filling system fitted that cost me more than what I paid for the fountain pen. But it writes beautifully and I was terribly glad I had been to Vandana Book Store.

On Saturday, the second day of the workshop, the whole thing was over by lunch time. After lunch I caught the Metro at JLN stadium station and went to Nehru Place. I checked out the Nanda bookstore but couldn’t find any title worth buying. There was a hard copy of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’and also a hardcover copy of VS Naipaul’s ‘The Masque of Africa’ that I did not buy. I was back in Hyderabad by midnight. This was one trip to New Delhi when I returned without a book.