So many books, so little time!-Frank Zappa

I had my mind made up even before the Winter Study Tour itinerary came up that I will make these seven weeks count. The only problem was I did not know how I would do that. I am neither a very widely travelled person nor do I have a trace of that wandering spirit that Paul Thoreaus make. To add to my troubles I am also lazy and the last I heard, travel and indolence are not the best of friends. So within a matter of minutes the big question staring me in the face was not how I am going to fill Kipling’s unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run but whether my Bharat Darshan will be Longfellow’s funeral marches to ennui.

Well, the beauty of the academy’s training regimen is that vexed questions like ‘to travel or not to travel’ are not left for you to settle, you have no options other than to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. Books are the love of my life. I like reading them, buying them, looking at their cover pages, smelling them, stacking them, in short all about them. And thus I came out of my reflection session with the idea that if nothing else books will watch my back and I will come out of my Bharat Darshan unscathed.

Jammu

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.-Groucho Marx

With that thought, three paperbacks and a kindle paper white I left for my Bharat Darshan. Our first stop was Jammu where we were to spend seven days for our attachment with the army. I did not know of any famous bookstores in Jammu so I did not have high hopes of visiting any. I did know of one good independent bookshop called Gulshan bookstore in Srinagar but as fate would have it Srinagar was not even a long shot from Jammu. The army attachment was a revelation, it was tough, it was rugged and it was uncomfortable but boy was it exhilarating. The seven days we spent with the 93rd Infantry brigade and the Rashtriya Rifles (Romeo Force) had more wisdom packed in than many books. And to my surprise I also found out that the army as an institution reads a lot. It was here that I met Major Nagendra of 3 8 Gorkha rifles, an avid reader who made it a point to read at least one book a week, he read even when he was sitting 200 metres away from the nearest Pakistani post. The books I found during my army attachment were a revelation. I had earlier read that people like Jawaharlal Nehru and Antonio Gramsci had done some of their most prolific work while in prison but it was during my stay with the army that I realised that the human intellect despises inactivity. No matter what the conditions, the mind will always find a way to express itself and man’s imagination always needs nourishment. The books people read and the stuff they write reveals a lot about them. I found army men maintaining diaries on forward posts like Shahpur and Mastandhara in the Jammu sector. These men were as adept at using their pens as they were in handling their AKs.

The army was also not found wanting in the quality of books they read. In the officer’s mess of the 16 Rashtriya Rifles I found such outstanding volumes like Srinath Raghavan’s War and Peace in Modern India, Sun Tzu’s Art of War and tomes on military law and military history. The library that 93rd Infantry brigade maintained was slightly more alien to me for very few books stocked there

belonged on my usual menu. It contained a lot of books on religion and self-help, it also had books on history and security but a lot of them were not classic volumes. The barracks of 37RR betrayed to me a great class divide. Barracks for starters house non-commissioned officers. The books contained in 37RR common area for Jawaans were mostly in the vernacular and from what I could gather by reading some of their covers they were almost all pulp fiction. If there was a subject called the sociology of books this would make for a case in point. I left the army attachment with a renewed faith in man’s indomitable spirit and the mind’s ceaseless curiosity.

1. Army’s brain trust!

2. Sociology of books!

Panipat

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves -William Shakespeare

Panipat where I stayed for the next ten days was what the French would call comme ci, comme ça. The district administration was not very keen on making us work hard and despite my best efforts I could find no good places for books in Panipat. All I could find was the closed doors of a municipal library which by some account used to have a sizeable collection in its heyday. Some roadside bookstalls that I visited in Panipat also made me realise that times they were a changing. When I was an adolescent most of these roadside and railway platform bookstalls proudly stacked any number of comic books (or comics as we used to call them in the Hindi heartland). Raj Comics, Manoj Chitrakatha, Tulasi Pocket Books and Chacha Choudhary used to rule the roost then. It made me both sad and nostalgic at the same time to see the demise of a beautiful subculture. Even the district library of Panipat housed no classics like ‘Gunahon Ka Devata’, hell it didn’t even have page turners like Gulshan Nanda. All it had was a mix of competition books for all sorts of exams UPSC, SSC, IIT JEE, PMT, CAT and many hollow but hopeful faces of young aspirants. Panipat’s subjail however reinforced my faith in books, it had at least four shelves of books ranging from religious works like the Gita and Quran to primers for Hindi and English (one would expect that these two ideal types are most needed by people who are condemned by the society to spend time in chains).

3. Hope and other drugs!

Kochi Airport

The good and the bad.

Our next stop was Lakshadweep via Kochi. I have made it a point not to be too generous at airport bookstores, as a matter of habit I use them often for window shopping only. However this time I swerved. The Sanskar’s at Kochi airport was a mix of some classic non-fiction like ‘The men who ruled India’ by Phillip Mason, some exciting ones like Shiv Shankar Menon’s latest book to some downright pedestrian volumes on how Julius Caesar inspires today’s business leaders. The only

upside to my visit to Sanskar’s was the sermon I got on how bookshops are dying a slow and painful death and how his store used to be visited by big authors in its prime. It was a sorry tale indeed but we are all powerless in front of history’s march to post modernity.

4. Longing for a place in the sun!

Lakshadweep

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read-Benjamin Franklin

Lakshadweep had the sun, the sea and the sand. We visited three of its thirty six islands and I found the accompanying languor to be captivating. The island was peaceful and laid back. Finished my Oxford handbook to India’s Foreign Policy here (a book I was struggling with for the better part of the past four months). The resort at Bangaram island had a large collection of books, alas they were all in French and German. This again was an indicator of the times gone by when only Europeans could afford a lengthy sojourn at Lakshadweep. We also had a chance encounter with Neelotpal Basu, the former rajya Sabha MP, at Lakshadweep and spent a pleasant afternoon discussing books, history and politics. I must say that in line with the best traditions of the left he was vastly read and possessed an impressive depth and range of knowledge on issues as diverse as the free software movement to the Ketan Parekh stock market scam.

5. Lost in translation at Bangaram!

Back to Kochi

Thank god for Uber!

Kochi was a relief because it gave me the luxiry of Uber and Ola, so unlike smaller districts like Panipat where I had to persuade some of my friends to accompany me to bookstores here I could just book a cab online and go places. I made full use of my new found independence and spent two beautiful evenings in the lap of artists and authors. The Kochi Biennale is one of India’s largest art festivals and a visit to some of its exhibition spaces gave me a very acute sense of my own limitations. The other spectacle was Princess Street. Among other things it housed two beautiful bookstores called Everyman’s second hand bookshop and Idiom booksellers, both retained all the charm of an old independent bookstore touched by globalisation of ideas but not in the least bit flustered by liberalisation of economies. Princess Street also housed a few art schools and many ‘wannabe Italian’ cafes that served good food, alien names notwithstanding. Our next destination was Munnar. There were many things worth admiring in Munnar but books and bookstores were not among them. At Munnar we had the wonderful experience of visiting a tea estate, a tea museum and merchandise shops that sold gazillion types of coffee.

6. An art exhibit at the Kochi Biennale

7. Uniqueness redefined at Everyman’s.

8. They sell books don’t they?

Coimbatore

Rah rah rah for google maps.

The Coimbatore administration had made us put up in the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and I had two options with me regarding bookstores to visit. First was an indie bookstore called Cheran

Books and the second was the good old Sapna Book House. I had visited Sapna once albeit in a different city a few years ago and I must say that I was not impressed. May be it was because of my innate aversion to bookstore chains but I didn’t find the idea of returning to Sapna enticing. However as luck would have it my Uber didn’t arrive even after repeated instructions and the only choice I had was to use my google maps and pay a visit to Sapna which was only about three kilometres away. Defying all my expectations this time I found that the Sapna at Coimbatore was in fact very good. It had two very long shelves on classics and they were both absolute delights. It also had a very eclectic collection on biographies and memoirs and I bought the first volume of Bob Dylan’s memoirs from here. Sapna made me realise that first impressions can be deceptive.

Bengaluru

My old stomping ground!

As far back as I can remember I have looked forward to be in Bangalore. Blossom and bookworm are two good reasons why anyone and everyone should visit Bangalore often. Blossom Book house is the ‘primus inter pares’ of all independent bookstores in India. Apart from the three storied marvel the people you find at Blossom are the best, the owner is a repository of knowledge on all kinds of books and you get a strange old world feeling once inside the place. You almost forget that you are in a city gripping with some of worst fallouts of urbanisation. At Blossom you are unlikely to get any of the modern merchandise that new age book chains like Oxford or Sapna have made us so used to, but what you might stumble upon is an original 1988 print of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s ‘English, August’. Blossom in many ways is fighting a losing battle, even independent bookshops today have started selling attractions other than books, I am no Luddite but I think that this is one of the less desirable features of modern book trade. The latest Bangalore visit was rendered even more memorable by a chance encounter me and a few of my friends had with Ramachandra Guha at Koshy’s café. The man was in no hurry and entertained our almost juvenile questions for almost two hours.

9. Bangalored at Koshy’s with Ramachandra Guha!

Hassan

Travelling in time!

Till the time we invent a reliable time machine places like Hassan are our only peeping holes into history. At Hassan we were standing in the courtyard of a nine hundred year old living temple. It was like a dream. What was even more fantastic was that all around the Hoysalleshwara modern life had cropped up. There was a primary school in its vicinity where young students were joyously devouring their midday meals. It was almost as if time had become irrelevant in this transition from modern to ancient and as Gloria Steinem often says it is only in India that one can find settlements separated by millennia in peaceful coexistence.

10. Back and forth in time!

Belgaum

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.-Elizabeth Berg

For me Belgaum was something that existed on some other plane. I had only heard about the place in two contexts, first in the context of the political history of India and all the tug-o-war between Marathi speakers and Kannada speakers and the second because a friend studied in the medical college here. So, for me Belgaum existed only in conversations and not in the real world. We had an extended stay of four days in Belgaum and the official schedule was not all too packed. Therefore I was struggling to fill time a bit. It was then that the power of serendipity dawned on me. On a trip to the city’s main market to buy a birthday cake for a friend I discovered a nice little bookstore called ‘Wordpower’. It was a sleepy store above a two wheeler showroom. The building that housed it was nondescript and it was down to sheer chance that I placed my eyes at the right place at the right time. The store had an amazing range on Hindi fiction (surprising for a city that is perennial bone of contention for Marathi and Kannada speakers), the rest as they say was a few hours of bliss. Lo and behold I could reach the birthday party with the cake just in time not to embarrass my friends.

11. Wordpower made easy!

Mumbai

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.-Jerry Seinfeld

I reached Mumbai like Bangalore with a lot of anticipation. A store named smoker’s corner was on my mind since a while and I was determined to experience it when I was in the city. After our attachment with the Mumbai Port Trust we still had almost half a day left to us and I decided to spend that afternoon hunting for books in the Fort Mumbai area. Fort Mumbai like Fort Kochi was original commercial district of the city. Financial institutions like the Reserve Bank of India, India’s Monetary Museum and the headquarters of many banks were situated here. Fort Mumbai also housed many art galleries like the Jehangir Art gallery and the Chemould Prescott Gallery, I would have certainly liked to visit some of these but for time and priorities. The Smoker’s Corner Bookshop belittling my huge expectation turned out to be a dud. It was unique in the sense that it only sold second hand books in a rundown building of years past and the most expensive book in the store was priced at Rs. 30/-, but the innovation stopped at just that. The store mostly sold fiction and that too of the TV soap variety, leave alone classics I hadn’t even heard of most of the books shelved there. To me the reputation enjoyed by Smoker’s Corner can only be explained by the store being emblematic of a time long lost. The store’s collection represented the tastes of the Mumbai elite when there was no TV or internet fill one’s time. Smoker’ corner must have been to the Mumbai young adult what Raj comics were to the young adults of the Hindi heartland.

Mumbai however was not a complete disappointment, barely six hundred metres from smoker’s corner I found the breath taking ‘Kitabkhana’. Kitabkhana was a store which I would have described

as bourgeoisie in my heady college days. It was a two storied shop with very elegant interiors. Books were all neatly stacked and there were a lot of hardbacks being sold like hot potatoes. The first floor had a spacious reading area oozing with wisdom and surrounded by books on philosophy. The ground floor of the store also had café with mostly Caucasians in attendance. The range that the store had on both fiction and non-fiction in Hindi and English was marvellous and I bought three from my to-read list here (Sanskriti ke Chaar Adhyaya by Dinkar, Deewar me Khidki Rehti hai by Shukla and Kitney Pakistan by Kamaleshwar). Kitabkhana was a gem waiting to be discovered.

12. The magic of paper!

Jalgaon

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.― Alexander Pope

We reached Jalgaon with low energy and even lower expectations. The Jain Irrigation people however gave me a pleasant shock when on the first day itself they introduced me to the Gandhi Research Foundation’s research library and the Gandhi Foundation bookshop. The library housed some of the rarest works by Gandhi like his Gujarati translation of Plato’s Republic and John Ruskin’s Unto the Last. Spending an afternoon in the Gandhi Museum followed by a walk through some Gandhi memorabilia was a sobering experience. It is with visits like these that we are always reminded of the vocation we have chosen for ourselves. Our belief in Gandhiji’s talisman needs to be reinforced thus and often.

Delhi

Dilli ke na the kuche, Auraq-e-mussavir the, Jo shakl nazar aayi, tasveer nazar aayi

(Delhi’s streets were not alleys but parchment of a painting, every face that appeared seemed like a masterpiece)-Mir

My longstanding desire to visit the Daryaganj Sunday market remains unfulfilled as of now. However I did successfully complete my ritual of visiting at least one bookshop while I was in Delhi. The store this time was full circle in Khan Market. Full Circle is very much like a sturdy independent bookstore in the heart of a big city. It has books like bestsellers, children’s fiction and some page turners on its shelves. The store’s café is frequented by the ‘haves’ of the city in a bid to show, albeit with little success, that they are not far behind when it comes to the matters of the mind

Mussoorie

….and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.-Eliot

On the seventh of March I was back in Mussoorie in the lap of Cambridge book house. Cambridge’s chief claim to fame of course is the fact that Ruskin Bond pays a visit to this store every Saturday however the books that they sell come a close second. With Cambridge curtains came down over my Bharat Darshan and it was time for reflection.

Mukul Kesavan once called the IAS probationer’s Bharat Darshan “valuable fiction which helps us believe in the idea of India.” I have no bones to pick with Mr. Kesavan but an IAS probationer’s Bharat Darshan is what an IAS probationer makes of it. Was it a journey of self-discovery? Well the good things in life are almost never that grandiose. Was it enjoyable? Undoubtedly yes. Did I make the seven weeks count? Now, this is a question I had started my Bharat Darshan with and by the end of the tour I don’t lack conviction on the answer. Yes I did make them count. The thing about Bharat Darshan is that the full impact of it will reveal itself only with time but I suspect that like a good book it has had lasting impact on how I see things. Great Indians like Gandhi and Nehru have taken their own versions of the Bharat Darshan and in the process refined their understanding of India. I am certain that my own Bharat Darshan has given me perspective about the fundamentals that make up a huge nation such as ours and if nothing else at least I travelled continuously for seven weeks, ain’t that something? What I saw was not just books and bookstores but a whole world behind them. Books are business, they are politics, and they are history and geography, ethnicity, religion and more. I don’t know whether my attempt to understand Bharat through the lens of books will help me become a good civil servant or not but it sure was enjoyable. These books and bookstores served as a metaphor for the Bharat Darshan itself, for as the great American author William Styron once said “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading”.