Book Fair

"Books of every thinkable genre are stacked together summing up the theme for the year, ‘Books for All’"...So went on an advertisement for Chennai's 29th book fair. Having been in Chennai all my life I wanted to explore the Book fair for the first time this year. So I took my parents too alongwith me and headed towards the Quaid-e-Millat College grounds where almost 350-400 stalls were put up.

As I entered the venue, I started to wonder if I was at the right place...With the sight of a Sangeetha Veg Restaurant and a couple of vendors selling various food items in the vicinity, for a moment, it did not feel like I was there to see a book fair. The Entry fee was a very very nominal five bucks. (It appeared more like a formality)...Had to walk for quite some distance to reach the book stalls. In the meantime, there was cacophony all around with some onstage events such as "pattimandram", etc going on in the campus. I finally reached the book stalls. The first few were totally not to my taste...Took me a while to get into stalls where I could relate to the topics...In the meantime, I had noticed that my parents (who had come along with me) had moved about to other stalls catering to their interests. Pretty obviously, our preferences were mutually exclusive! after a while I got totally lost in the variety of books belonging to different genre. I did not realize that two people had accompanied me to this place!

There were few book stalls with novels of all sorts...Then there were a couple of stalls with all techie stuff...You can browse through items ranging from Digital Fortress by Dan Brown to Cryptography by William Stallings....Given that there were only two days for the fair to close, the crowd was increasing by the minute. It was a tad disappointing that most stalls predominantly had books on philosophy, self-improvement, etc and most of them in Tamil.

After getting lost amidst the ocean of books (and of people!) we found our way to the exit only to find another series of stalls on the roadside platform. Books were priced at extraordinarily cheap rates here, but still people were haggling with the sellers. I had had an overdose of seeing and buying books for the day, so I did not bother to venture in these platform shops.

For a techie/fiction buff, this book fair is not very interesting, given that you get the same ten percent off in most of the famous book stores in the city.

However, all said and done, it is interesting to see that despite the advent of cyberspace, etc books still seemed to be the best friends for so many people.