Meeting a Bookworm

 I have a few bookworm friends. It's a great pleasure meeting them, and in Bangalore, I try to meet at Church Street, where you can worship books at at least 5 places of worship- bookstores, I mean. So it was that Anushka and I met at this interesting spot, which incidentally has been turned into a pedestrian zone and you can therefore see a lot of creative uses of the street by vendors, street musicians and so on. Here is photographic evidence of our meet..because when you get tired after book-shopping, you need a cup of tea to refresh yourself. So we tried some at Tea Villa. The crispy corn with water chestnuts was good too, and reminded me of Indore's Sayaji hotel. I must say she is a good photographer!

Why I Hate Self-service

Self-service is a non-starter, as far as I am concerned.

First of all, the meaning of service is that the service-person is dedicated to serve me, the customer. If I am serving myself, what is he there for? Serving himself?

I end up buying more of everything I don't need, because of these *&* damn self-service retail stores. Who will pay me for all the wasteful expenditure?

The self-service concept dumbs down the service-people. Try conversing with a bookstore service-person in a book store, and you'll know what I mean. Do we want them to reach the IQ levels of a McD service-person in the U.S??

I hate to do my own work, when I don't have to. If I look for products, order them online, pay for them myself, and collect them at my doorstep myself, what are the service people doing? Or instead of royally hailing a cab or an autorickshaw (tuk-tuk),, if I have to spend many minutes booking it, and then explaining to the cab guy where to find me, I am not exactly thrilled by the experience.

Say NO to self-service. I would have started a movement against it, but then, that would be another exercise in self-service...

The Vanishing Bookstores

When visiting Pune recently, I found that the Landmark, which originally started out as a bookstore plus in Chennai a few years ago and then got taken over by the Tatas, had closed its branch at SGS Mall, which was accessible easily to me from where I live.

This is not the only bookstore I know that has closed, though. There are many more. Manney's also in the same area as above, shut down earlier. A few Crosswords that I knew of have also closed-one on Bangalore's Residency Road, for instance.

As a person who likes to browse before he buys, I am concerned. That civilisation is in danger, if we only order online and don't want to spend the time browsing in actual physical stores. There seems to be something wrong here. Airport bookstalls were almost a given, until I found two years ago that Delhi's budget departure lounge did not have a book store any more. This is such an obvious place to sell books, so I don't know what went wrong. The greed of the airport in increasing lease rentals, sounds like a plausible explanation.

Anyway, as I was saying, I am concerned. And I hope that there are a few good stores left to sell books during my lifetime.