Strand Book Fair

I couldn't have found a better place for spending my sunday afternoon. A place where i was surrounded by so many of books. Being surrounded by so many books had always given me a high. I was planning to go to Strand Book Fair for quite some time, but had neither the time nor the oppurtuinity to do so. Strand Books' legacy of offering a minimum of 20% discount on the books and the wide coverage given by media were adding to my excitement so much that Sunday morning i decided, be it rain or fall i am going there today.

Even if it was a lazy sunday afternoon, all the three halls where the Book Fair was being conducted in the Chinnaswamy Stadium was filled with people. Childrens rummaging over the tables containing comics, couples discussing whether 'Freakonomics' would make a good read or not, friends recommending books for each other, elderly people moving slowly from one table to another were the common sights. All of them had two things in common - a carry bag full of books and a passion for reading. It was nice to see so many ardent readers discussing fervently which book to buy and which not. Even with so many technological gadgets occupying our attention and space, books remain a man's best friend till date.

In my childhood, books came to me weaving a magical world of fairies, dwarfs, princesses, princes, kings and queens. They brought with them Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Pinochio, Peter Pan and Cindrella. In my dreams these characters flocked in once in a while giving me an interesting story to remember for days to come.Those years, everything that i read had a mystical aura surrounding it. Years passed by and books came to me as Diamond Comics, Sherlock Holmes, Famous Five and Princess Diaries. After that they came to me as Three Men in a Boat and a few more. Then came the huge bunch of technological books and somewhere in the process of mugging them up i lost my magical world. I lost everything magical about books and they became mere huge chunks of papers which i have to eat up to score more in my exams, to get into a good engineering college, to get a good job and the list went on. I had become too busy cramming them up that i lost in touch any book other than my text books. After all, your priorities at a particular point of time govern your interests to a certain extend.

But now i have to catch up with all those years which i have spent ignoring my books. I am trying to find as much time as possible to read. I want to be in the world of Somerset Maugham and Charles Dickens. I want to read 'World is Flat' and 'Freakonomics'. I want to discuss books with my friends. I want to own all the lovely books in this world. All in all I want to be in that magical world yet again.

-dewdrop