A No Haul Sunday

A No Haul Sunday

Once in a while I return from the Sunday morning trip to Abids hands empty and heart filled with disappointment. On such days I also feel secretly relieved that I did not buy any book to bring home, books that will fill up space in the already burgeoning shelves at home. But that feeling is a rare one and also a fleeting one whereas the disappointment at not finding anything lasts the whole day and sometimes, the whole week. All through the week I regret not picking up the books I had flipped through. I had seen a copy of Elmore Leonard’s ‘Glitch’ which I did not buy since I already have the book. I had also seen books by William Faulkner that I did not, regretfully, buy.

There was more cause for regret. I had seen a nice, hardcover copy of Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather Papers’ that was for hundred rupees. I did not buy it for some reason, maybe I thought the rate was too high or the guy who had the book was one who wasn’t the bargaining sort. Only a couple of months ago I had found a paperback copy of the same book. I had been elated since I had been on the look out for the book since several years and had bought it without a second thought. Still, I thought of buying the hardcover copy last Sunday but ultimately I ended up not buying it. Next week I plan to buy it. That is, if it is still there. The other week too I had made a similar promise to myself with another book.

I had seen Vladimir Nobokov’s ‘Lectures in Literature’ that I missed buying because of its condition but later I promised myself that I would pick it up the following week. But the following Sunday I couldn’t find the book which left me heartbroken. It would have been a good book to read and I felt stupid not buying it the moment I saw it. But I realized there are other people who do more stupid things at Abids.

I’m referring to those people who buy pirated books. I can understand (though not agree with) people who cannot afford the expensive and hard to get original editions. But when people who appear well dressed and look like they can afford anything buy pirated books by the dozen I feel irritated. It is something I cannot ever fathom. Every Sunday I see people buy pirated copies of popular bestsellers. I’ve even seen people buying pirated copies of books of Chetan Bhagat! Imagine not being able shell out ninety five books which is what his original books are priced at. It is difficult to understand such people. For some reason I do not find second hand copies of his books.

Even difficult to understand is finding there are people who do not think anything about tearing a book in half. On Sunday I felt glad when I saw a heap of PG Wodehouse titles that I rarely get to see. But when I flipped the cover of one title I saw that all the pages were torn into half sideways. All the nearly dozen books were mutilated in that manner. The entire book, cover and number of pages were intact except for the horizontal tear. Nothing is more heartbreaking for a book lover than to come across books torn in that barbaric manner. I wonder who it could have been who disposed his entire collection of PG Wodehouse books after tearing the pages. I hope never to come across that person.

Three Things

The Fountain Pen
I always lose my heart to the beautiful ones, fountain pens, that is. A few weeks ago when Uma showed me his new Hero fountain pen I wanted one for myself at any cost. It was a beautiful one, quite unlike the usual Hero fountain pens, with an open nib and eye dropper ink filling mechanism which I prefer. It was sleek, light weight and wrote so well that I fell in love with it right away. It wasn’t until recently that Uma traced out one for me.

When I hold a beautiful fountain pen like my new Hero I feel like Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry and Gabriel Garcia Marquez all rolled into one. It is enough to have it in the pocket to feel like a writer. I don’t feel it is necessary to write anything to feel like a good writer. To me the feeling of being a writer is enough there are people who have written three books and don’t feel like writers, forget about being considered as writers. With a pen like that in hand I feel it isn’t really difficult to write a novel.

The Notebook
For the same reason that I pick up fountain pens I also pick up notebooks though not as often as I want to. Sometime last month I was on a training session in the company of officials from outside the state. We were taken on a sightseeing trip to Shilparamam where I chanced upon some lovely notebooks in a stall. They were of handmade paper with a soft brown leather cover. I picked up one for fifty rupees and decided to buy a few more sometime later. I want to buy at least three for myself and a couple more to give away to friends. I hope the stall is still there at Shilparamam.

The Bookmark
One of the many things that my kid handcrafts, some happen to be bookmarks. Tired of watching me use platform tickets, visiting cards, folded bus tickets and the like as bookmarks he makes them for me. But I don’t have the heart to use them because I tend to misplace my bookmarks too often. I don’t want to lose the bookmarks he makes spending a lot of time and effort on them. The one in the picture is the latest bookmark he made for me. By the way, he was short listed for the finals of the ‘Young World Painting Competion’ the finals which will be held next Sunday. Watch this space for more about the result.

The Sunday Haul

Normally I hesitate to pick up any book by an author whose name I haven’t heard before anywhere. But if the book’s title has a word that comes close to magical like ‘writing’,’ or ‘Tuscany’ I buy it with eyes closed. The other thing was that the cover was quite good and it was a Penguin imprint. So it was it with eyes closed that I bought Allan Parker’s ‘Seasons in Tuscany’ for only twenty rupees last Sunday at Abids. It was the only book I bought and the other find was a magazine- the absolutely latest (Oct 09) issue of ‘National Geographic Traveler’ that I got for just ten rupees.

What they say about not judging a book by its cover seems to have a lot of truth in it. Allan Parker’s ‘Seasons in Tuscany’ did not appear as good as I thought when I bought it looking at its cover. Maybe I had expected the sort of writing Frances Mayes managed in ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ which evoked Tuscany like nothing before. SIT was too run of the mill with a lot of things happening too quickly. In the first two pages the author falls in love with a woman quite too easily. Then there are paragraphs and paragraphs of dry description about the place. With insipid prose and an insconsistent style the first thirty pages were a disappointment but I hope the rest of the book will somehow make it up.

It was surprising not to find any mention of Tuscany in the 25th Anniversary Edition issue of ‘National Geographic Traveler’ that featured the World’s Greatest Destinations in ‘50 Places of a Lifetime.’ Of course, there was Florence and another place, Salina in Italy but I was surprised Tuscany did not find a place along with Provence, which too was missing. Two places in India find a place in the list. All destinations in this issue are written by famous writers of the country. Shashi Tharoor wrote about Delhi and Amitabh Kant did the honours for Fatehpur Sikri. I don’t know why no one writes about the beautiful Andamans. There are some places in the Andamans which make you think of spending the rest of the life there doing nothing but watching the sunrise. Maybe someday I will write about it.

A Driver's Suicide

Such things always seem to happen when I am not around. The week before, on Monday afternoon, when I was down with fever at home I got a call from my boss. He told me cryptically that our jeep driver had committed suicide early in the morning. He took pesticide and died in a van in the office premises my boss told me. He did not say anymore but told me the news was breaking on television. When I switched it on I was more shocked than surprised because one of the channels said harassment by officials was one of the reasons for the driver’s suicide. I happened to be one of the officers working there!

Then the phone rang non-stop. One of my assistants filled me with the details. It seems the driver had left two suicide notes. The discovery of the body itself was an event he told me. The driver was supposed to report early in the morning to take a group of farmers to Hyderabad. So my assistant too had reached the office in the morning and was desperately trying to reach the driver on his cell phone. It was getting late and the farmers were beginning to get restive. When my assistant had left the office to find out, one of the farmers called him on phone to say that there was a body in the van parked inside the office premises. The driver lay on the last seat, frothing at the mouth. He had kept two suicide notes in his pocket.

Finally, it emerged that the driver had blamed an officer who had worked in the office more than a year ago, for driving him to suicide. When I reached my office five days later I got a different picture. The driver was not well, he had problems at home and was depressed. It was quite apparent that he was depressed because all day he would sit in the van and stare out into space. Once or twice I had tried to talk with him but he would give only monosyllabic replies. But now after his suicide I could realize what he would have been thinking of.

What saddened me was the role of the officer in the suicide. He had left almost a year ago but what he did the driver could not forget. I cannot write here how he affected the driver’s life but it made me angry. I could not believe that people could stoop to such levels. It was a sordid story not worth recounting here.

Village Trips

Once in a blue moon the job throws up something that leads to interesting experiences. Something similar happened the previous week. Almost three months into the new posting I was pretty settled with the routine in the office. I would wake up, get on with my routine of reading and writing until ten in the morning after which I would take the few steps to cross the road to the office. At the office I would sit most of the time doing almost nothing. After nearly nine years of sitting cooped up in an office I thought the new posting would take me to the fields. I happen to be posted to a training institution where I was supposed to train others, farmers mostly. However I was doing nothing of the sort and instead I got trained twice. In short, I was comfortably ensconced in my little routine until last week. I was told, no ordered, to stand in for an officer in a distant place. Not surprisingly I was reluctant to go. But I had no choice.

Not only was the place very far away, the other thing was that I had to travel to three villages daily for five days. I wasn’t given any vehicle or support and not even told what I was supposed to do. I only knew that I have to have meetings with farmers in fifteen villages. A couple of days ago I had addressed nearly hundred farmers in three villages but there I had others to support me. Here in the new assignment I was to do a solo job of it. It seemed a daunting task in every way. I decided to travel to the place from Hyderabad which was nearer. I took my bike to a roadside town on the state highway, from where I traveled to this place I will call MG. From MG I planned to visit three villages every day for five days. I had only one lady assistant, a newly recruited person to assist me.

On the first day I traveled on my bike for seventy five kilometers to MG and from there deep into the rural hinterland. It turned out to be very unlike the other village. To begin with the entire area was hilly, with winding roads, fields on either side. The hillocks were green with trees, the paddy, cotton, jowar fields were green. It was greenery everywhere. In the mild sunlight of wintry late afternoons the grassy landscape looked quite beautiful. It was another time when I wished I had a camera better than the one I carried. Nevertheless I clicked the accompanying pictures. In a couple of villages I was told one could find deer in the wilderness. There were also herds of wild boar that destroyed the crops. I once saw a peacock on a hillock.

So it went. Every morning I would travel in a bus upto the roadside town where I parked my bike. I would go on the bike to MG from where I would go to the villages. The meetings were a challenge. The farmers are not so naïve as everyone thinks they are. One slip and you’re exposed so one has to be very careful about what one talks. I was able to conduct meetings without any trouble. It wasn’t even boring because one village was not like the other. I learnt new things and an interesting episode I plan to write for ‘Open Page’ in The Hindu soon. I would have lunch in a farmer’s house in the bigger villages or else I would return to MG for lunch. So for five days I was touring villages, meeting farmers, talking to them and learning new things myself. It was tiring no doubt but it also was a rewarding experience in the end.

The Sunday Haul

Though the saying ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ doesn’t apply when it comes to books, I always regret not buying books that I come across at Abids on Sundays. The feeling of regret lasts a week until I pick it up the next Sunday and if I don’t find it then the feeling lasts forever. This Sunday at Abids however, I picked up a nice movie magazine that I had not earlier come across but it isn’t doing anything to stem the feeling of remorse of not having bought the book I had seen. The book I missed picking up was Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lectures on Literature.’ I did not buy the book because it was in too bad a condition with water stains on all pages and a bent shape. I did not feel it was worth it but now I wish I had because it was really a treasure. The only thing I can do is hope it will be still on the pavements until next Sunday. But I will be away at work on Sunday so I have to make some arrangements for someone to buy it on my behalf that is if they can manage to find it.

Even as I was planning to watch Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Inglourious Basterds’ some day soon I stumbled across a film magazine that had a lot of stuff on the movie. ‘Empire’ magazine was yet another new find for me at Abids. It was the August 2009 issue, a fairly recent one that I got for only twenty bucks. The issue is some kind of a special issue listing out 1001 Greatest Movie Moments. It would take me decades to go through all those moments because I am not such a big movie fan. One can imagine how keen a movie buff I am if I let it be known that I watched ‘Pulp Fiction’ just a few months ago. Not that I don’t like movies but I find the whole process of getting to the movie theatre, standing in line for the tickets and watching the movie, a boring thing. Hence, it is only once or twice a year that I go to the movies. Anyway, now that I have a list of the good movies I might watch more of them in the future.

It seems there’s actually a movie titled ‘The Inglorious Bastards’ made in 1978 and is the inspiration for Tarantino. He even had the director of the original Italian movie, Enzo Castellari, in a cameo in the movie. This and a million other bits about other movies made and in the making fill Empire magazine. I might never find another issue again at Abids. This was a ‘one in a billion’ find! But there’s enough in it about TIB to make me go and watch it right away and again and again.

The Sunday Haul

Maybe it is a measure of my luck that I found the brochure of Mont Blanc's special edition 'Mahatma Gandhi' pen before the pen itself. Controversies apart, the pen is quite a smasher going by the looks and the exquisite craftsmanship that went into it as can be judged from the picture above. (pics courtesy: Uma Shankar Sastry) A picture is worth a thousand words so I won't waste any trying to describe how the fountain pen looks.

The other haul on Sunday was Amy Tan's 'The Hundred Secret Senses' that I got for fifty rupees. It was the first copy I saw though I had seen umpteen copies of her other book 'The Kitchen God's Wife' at Abids. I might read it sometime next year only.

Morning Calm

There’s something about watching the sun rise over a vast lake in utter silence in one’s own company that puts one in a meditative mood. Sunday I was at the Necklace Road at half past five in the morning when the day was just beginning. Looking at the cloud filled sky over the lake I thought I had made a mistake in coming. It looked like I wouldn’t be able to watch the sun rise. But I was lucky as a minor miracle happened. The sun peeped out of a gap between the dark clouds long enough for me to take a picture. After half a minute it was gone but it put me in a good mood. I spent the next hour soaking in the silence and recharging myself. I had missed doing this monthly ritual in the previous month because of the weather so I really enjoyed the routine.

Coming out to begin the next stage of the routine I saw a group of men jogging on the road with two men on a bike egging them on. From the looks of them they looked like cops. They talked in that easy manner that comes from a familiarity that can only develop when people do something together. After they passed a group of cyclists wearing helmets appeared. This must be the group I had read about somewhere.

Watching the sunrise after a gap of nearly two months put me in such a good mood that I did not mind what happened next when I reached Adarsh with the Sunday papers. There was place at only one table in a corner. Sitting at the table was my friend, the smoker who had irritated me on earlier Sundays. He appeared to come every day to the hotel to enjoy a smoke while sipping the Irani tea. I always found him at the hotel on the Sundays I came. But this Sunday I did not mind it much and let him smoke while I lost myself in the Sunday papers. I saw an ad for the iPod Nano and wondered when I would be able to own one. I've been going too long without music. However it was a good beginning to the Sunday. The finds at the Abids book bazaar were proof of that. Next post would be the Sunday Haul.

The Sunday Haul- Irving Wallace and Bill Bryson

Sooner or later I know I am going to find all the books on my list. But the search isn’t going to end since the list continues to grow even as I tick off titles in it. The more titles I find from the list, the more it gets added to. Last Sunday I found another book that’s been on the list for quite a long time. I don’t exactly remember when I added Irving Wallace’s ‘The Sunday Gentleman’ to the list but now the title’s been added to my shelf of books on writing.

Books by Arthur Hailey, Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace and others formed the popular reading in the eighties. I guess most of those who read English fiction in those days would have read their books sometime or the other. I was no exception. However the books written by them could be read only once and then discarded. Of all the books by Irving Wallace I was fascinated by one book and that was ‘The Prize’ which was a novel woven around the Nobel Prize. It wasn’t until recently that I found his ‘The Writing of One Novel’ which was all about how he came to write ‘The Prize.’ ‘The Writing of One Novel’ is one book of Irving Wallace that I read again and again at least once a year. It is a fascinating book every aspiring novelist perhaps should read at least once.

Before he started to write books full time, Irving Wallace was a magazine writer researching and writing articles for prestigious magazines like Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Esquire etc. Somewhere I had read about his non-fiction book called ‘The Sunday Gentleman’ in which he had written about his magazine writing life. I wanted to get hold of it and was on the look out for it since ages. At last I found it though it wasn’t a very good copy I got because the cover wasn’t good and part of the pages were wet. I picked it up nevertheless and I am glad I did it. I have read the first article in it which is all about his magazine writing career. Needless to say it is very engrossing as are the other pieces in it. I have read the one about the ‘Orient Express’ and another piece about a writer (Gilbert Patten) who created an unforgettable character called ‘Frank Merriwell.’ The amount of research he does is truly astonishing. There’s a piece in the book on the Rolls- Royce titled ‘Millionaire’s Chariot’ which I am looking forward to read soon.

For a long time I couldn’t decide who was funnier- Dave Barry or Bill Bryson? But now it is decided Dave Barry is my favorite, and Bill Bryson comes a close second. I will write about the reasons in a later post but for the time being let me put it on record that Bill Bryson is equally funny. In fact I read Bill Bryson before I stumbled on books of Dave Barry. Anyway, I have almost all of Bryson’s books except the recent ones-‘Mother Tongue,’ ‘Thunder Bolt Kid’ and ‘Shakespeare.’ It was the last title I found at Abids on Sunday. It was a brand new book which I got for only eighty rupees. It was a lucky find at a time when not many sellers are to be seen at Abids because of the Diwali shopping season.

Old City Chai

It’s Different in the Old City

When someone who’s taught you thirty years ago tells you to do something you cannot but obey him. A kind and indulgent teacher who shares my name told me during one of our regular chats that the Irani chai in Old City is very different from the stuff I drink in places like Bahar and Paradise. When he told me he’d take me to an Irani joint for a cup I fell for the hook. I had always wanted to try out the chai in the Old City and I got the chance on Sunday last. I happened to be in Charminar visiting relatives and I called up my teacher who is now a Professor. When someone who is a Professor doesn’t mind sitting pillion on your bike and sharing a cup chai with you one can imagine how the teacher-student bond was.

He took me to Hotel Nimrah right near the historic Charminar teeming with gawking tourists, pushcart vendors, autorickshaws and just about everything you can find near tourist spots. The hotel was crowded with all tables full so we had to stand and sip the delicious chai. My post lunch sluggishness vanished the moment I took the first sip and by the time I finished the last sip of the golden liquid my mind was clear and alert. Short of increasing my intelligence the Irani chai did everything else. It was truly very different from the Irani chai that I have at my usual joints. But it isn’t everyday that I come to the Old City. However I plan to make it a regular ritual from now on. I might come on some Sundays to check out the flea market and finish off with a cup of chai at either Nimrah or Faraasha that is right beside it.

A Victim of Floods

The matter of two thousand cusecs of water in the Hussain Sagar is making headlines in some city newspapers while elsewhere people are talking of lakhs of cusecs. One can imagine the sort of breathless hype these papers want to build as if two thousand cusecs of water is going wash away the city. The rains have brought to the fore the depthless potholes of Hyderabad again. Every newspaper worth its name is writing in detail about how bad the roads in the city have become. One has to wait and see when the promised repairs to the roads are made. Of course, one more rain and even the new roads will be washed away.

It is truly unimaginable how people in the flood affected parts of the state are suffering. It is hard to imagine people spending more than four days on hilltops, rooftops and other places without food with flood waters swirling around them on all sides. Everyone has been caught unawares with the sudden rains and the heavy flooding. It seems such type of floods have never been witnessed in the state. Everywhere you see there’s water and more water. Only a few weeks ago the talk was of drought and now you have more water everywhere than you can imagine in your life.

I had not really expected the floods to affect my life, but it happened. I was supposed to leave for Bangalore on Saturday evening but with all road links snapped I couldn’t make it. I had been making elaborate plans to spend a week in Bangalore on office work. I listed out all the people I would call on and talk with. I wanted to check out the second hand book places in Bangalore and also pick up a few titles. Bangalore is one of my favorite cities and I was eager to go over there. But the floods, as it were, poured water on my plans. I had to remain at home. It was a terrible disappointment. But life’s like that and one saying comes to mind- It is something to the effect that ‘life is what happens when you are busy making plans.’