Karuna Ezara Parikh on her magical affair with books.
I GIVE PEOPLE books like they’re going out of style. Actually, I give people books because they’re going out of style.
I’ve made ‘book-giving’ a sort of personal crusade. I don’t simply give to friends who read with hunger, I give them to everyone. I give people books in the hope that they will come over to the dark side.
I gift books with the confident knowledge that if they read the book that made me think of them, their lives (even if already perfect) will be just that tiny bit better. Because that’s what books do for me.
I’m like the annoying old aunt who gives you what she wants for Christmas, no matter what you asked for. I strive to make it something you will enjoy—magical short stories for my sister, Dalai Lama biographies for the spiritual, Japanese fiction for the quirky—but it is always a book.
I no longer buy books online. I know it’s cheaper and it’s easier too, but I actually like going to a bookstore. I like the pilgrimage: You pick a day, ask a friend, drive there, enter the cool, silent space, run your hands over spines, settle in for an hour or two, nodding to old friends (“Oh, hello there, Lolita new edition!”) and making some new ones along the way.
Perhaps you find my crusade extreme, but let me spell out Delhi’s literary losses over the last few years: It started with the closing of The Bookworm in Connaught Place and Yodakin in Hauz Khas Village. Then, last year, it was Fact & Fiction, Spell & Bound, Timeless Arts Book Studio and ED Galgotia & Sons. You can’t blame me for feeling it is the end of an era. Not simply the era of booksellers and patient old fools, but the end of The Age of Reading itself.
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