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I do not know how other people deal with it, but nonetheless, I am pretty sure it leaves most feeling confused, confounded and cross.
I am referring to the constant and incessant deluge of solicitations we face in public places, in most Indians cities.First, there are the armless, legless, homeless multitudes, rapping on your car window, tugging at your sleeve, wailing in your ear for money.
Then, there are the ceaseless sales pitches, from itinerant sellers of wares like fruits, umbrellas, pens, toys and flowers, who unlike sellers any where else in the world, beg you to buy their goods, not because you require them, but out of a sense of pity.
And then there are the latest in this procession of petitioners: the book sellers, those who confront you these days, hawking ( mostly pirated ) copies of Amartya Sen's 'The Argumentative Indian,' or Kiran Desai's 'The inheritance of Loss', or Paul Coelho's 'The Alchemist.'
According to me, it's the last vendors who are the most perplexing. After all fruits, flowers, air fresheners, umbrellas are no-brainers and can be utilized at any time or given away to willing receivers.
But books? Is there any other country in the world where people, who cannot read, urge, insist and beg you to buy some of the world's best read authors?
"Amrita Singh pado Memsahib" they plead, referring to the Nobel Laureate. "Bahut achcha kitab" or "The Secret! Madam, The Secret- abhi nikla"
This is no New York Review of books, not even an Amazon; this is raw, in -your- face literature, sold as a commodity, under the hot sun, on the streets of Mumbai.
And the worst part is that you feel sorry for the rain -drenched little boy so eagerly pressing his face into your car, so insistently foisting on you a book that you've already read, or have no intention of reading, so you buy a copy, ignoring your better judgment of not encouraging piracy, ignoring the pleas of your author friends who are robbed of their rightful royalties by this system, ignoring the fact that left to your own devices, you wouldn't have picked up the book if you happened to be in a book store.
You fork over the money; you take the book, you thank the child.
And what do you find? Most of the pages are stuck together, or are missing or are inked over.
And you wonder why you didn't just hand over the boy's commission to him without now having a book you can't read, and can't give away and feel bad throwing out.
It's vexed me this dilemma, and it doesn't seem to be going away. Each time I look, there are more urchins, hawking more books, making up more ersatz reviews.
And like every one else in Mumbai, I daily weigh my options between buying a bunch of wilted roses, a torch with dead batteries, a ceramic puppy that nods its head or a copy of Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'!
