STOREHOUSE OF KNOWLEDGE..

‘Daane, daane pey likha hota hai, khaney waley ka naam’.

What a lovely quote to hear at a Book Fair! It felt like every book on the display shelves had my name engraved.
This is a comment a sales person made while handing two volumes of Webster’s Dictionary as a complimentary gift for the purchase I had made. Wasn’t I lucky?
Being at the exhibition hall of the Airport Expo took me back to the Book Fair at Pragati Maidan,Delhi,where I’d make purchases every winter. I can also clearly recall the Book Fairs at my own Siliguri town, at the stadium area with makeshift shacks laden with books and the blaring Bengali music. Mind you, they’d be devotional ones and those with patriotic fervor would tune in without any inhibition.The look of the shop may not have been attractive but the goods i.e. the books surely were priceless. At such a bargain and for such publications, you wouldn’t give a second thought!
There were books on all subjects, themes, texture and quality. You just had to surf and I mean physically to find your type. There was no thinking or compromising, you had to grab your pick and cling on to them for fear of being sold off. People overlooked the dirt and dust to search for their treasure. It didn’t matter at all to squat on dirty floors and sieve through the pages of the piles of books. It was a treasure house of knowledge and everyone was lost in finding their treasure.

Th scenario here at the Airport Expo was almost similar with heaps of books, swarm of people and trollies loaded to the brim. The eyes however still retained the ‘hungry look’.
Book lovers were comfortably seated on the tiled floors sifting through pages and making choices, children running up and down in excitement and the enormous display of books. You could touch them, smell them, feel them, hold them and/or buy them. One could be buried in books. With the kind of enthusiasm and excitement that I witnessed in the crowd it’s contradictory to make a statement that books are no longer desired or craved for. It may be the age of technology but books are books and are here to stay. As long as there are avid readers there’ll always be hardback or paperback books. I definitely love to hold, smell and feel the pages of the book I read.