When I was growing up, booksellers weren’t aggressive venture-funded billionaires. They were old bearded people who looked (and probably were) homeless. They had all sorts of weird knowledge about everything, their income totally inversely proportional to what they’d read. Nine out of 10 times they were Bengali. Or French. Or British with that kind of wild disheveled professorial look that made them, in the event of unemployment, ideal for Harry Potter teacher casting.
Basically, anyone who worked in an Indian bookshop looked like they’d come straight from the shoot of a Shyam Benegal film. Many reading this will have no idea what that reference means. It means they could be played by Nassiruddin Shah. And they’d tell you why the book you were buying was nonsense and why something else was better. Then while telling you they were very busy, give you an hour-long lecture on the socio-political situation of the country and how everything was going to hell.
The bookshop itself was a crumbling edifice. Backed up on rent, charming, overstuffed, musty, sometimes you’d need a ladder to fetch a copy, a kind of zoo where intellectuals felt safe to roam basking in their social awkwardness. And perhaps find romance with similar animals. Without such places Woody Allen or Satyajit Ray would have no setting to shoot their kind of lovers. In the ’90s, in the golden age of The Barnes & Noble/Starbucksy (and locally Crosswordy/ Landmarky) world, coffee and books made love in a sort of high-end readers’ oasis. The architecture was all book cliché – wood panels, posters of Shakespeare/ Tagore sipping espresso – but in a gigantic four-floor Dubai mall-ish supermarket vibe.
Today, most bookshops are over. Anywhere in the world, except may be for Paris, where they are probably on strike against the internet. The few that remain in India essentially sell headphones and underwear, baby socks, etc. with the customary essential healthy eating guide by a former model with a foreword by Kareena Kapoor. Everyone reads on iPads and phones, while fiddling with 11 other apps.
If Vikram Seth knew one day he’d have to compete with your friend Tejal’s tweet about a dog playing a banjo or your boyfriend’s curt, “sup?” on Whatsapp, while you did online farming, he’d have become an engineer like all parents said we should have.
However, an India bookseller last week raised a billion dollars from Silicon Valley. The Indian media focused naturally on the silly childish stuff, how rich they’ve personally become compared with other rich Bangalore people but missed the thing the CEO Sachin Bansal was desperately trying to say.
Which is that he cannot keep up with demand. He needs to build infrastructure to get stuff to people – delivery warehouses, people on bikes, those Flipkart T shirts, web back-end, whatever else. Like Jeff Bezos, the original book billionaire knows well, Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a post office.
Theirs is a logistics business, warehousing and shipping and delivery. Books are one of the things, but as time has told us, you can buy anything on there – from an entire oven to probably a person with free time. You start with a bookshop online, all quaint and lovely. Eventually, you become an online Macy’s. Books get a corner.
Before they died, as anyone who had ever been to a Crossword-ish mall kind of place can attest, we were not exactly the world’s most die-hard reading populace. As is obvious from what they eventually evolved into. First year, there’d be all sorts of cool writers and new foreign releases. In two or three years, there’d be a copy of a Jobs biography, some Mickey Mehta gym guide DVD, a Wii player and a silver box of kishmish. All on the bestseller rack.
So when Sachin Bansal says he can’t stay up with demand, was that the essential problem? That we were dying to read but only if someone delivered it at home? That we were determined to stay ignorant and illiterate till cash-on-delivery came along?
Surely that wasn’t the problem. Our reading appetite, regardless of the hassle of finding parking to pick up the new Chetan Bhagat, is perhaps the same whether Crossword in a mall kept it or a Flipkart person whispers it to me while I sleep (a worrying thought).
So what are people going crazy about? A quick search will tell you that the biggest-selling item at these online stores are phones and clothes. So Flipkart is now Oberoi mall. That it once may have been Bahri and Sons for the internet is not where its scalable business model lies or what Silicon Valley can afford. There’s double-digit growth in smart phones, not so much in Salman Rushdie.
So in the era of our digital Walmart, books will get some corner floor (area of the webpage). When you get to that corner, you’d get every kind of book you can think of at a tap of a forefinger or by some guy at your door (if Mr Bansal can afford to send him). Which is progress. Getting any information you want was unthinkable or arduous at any other time in our history. Monks and people like that would climb up serious looking mountains and risk lives across ravines and stuff to read some ancient scroll. Someone in heaven must be going “Damn. Only if I had Flipkart when I was writing the Rig Veda…”
But when you give everything to people, as time has told us, it doesn’t make us any wiser. It doesn’t mean people will rush to read the entire oeuvre of Nobel laureates. It just means, it will show us what people really care about – animals doing cute things, candy being crushed, Samsung tablets, and pornography.
So the books corner will get smaller and smaller in Mr Bansal’s new zillion-dollar world. The Bengali/French/British homeless man will close his shop, drink his Scotch, torch his stock shouting obscenities at the digital age. We’d say, I can buy anything any time, books have this corner, stop cribbing old bookshop man.
And in time, the shrinking book corner will become an icon the size of the arrow on a Macbook next to the big photo of the jeans or the charger that’s selling well they’d want you to click on. And it will take longer to fiddle with the little thing than buy a book. And we’ll say hell with it, I wish there was a place you know, where I could just get a book.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Basically, anyone who worked in an Indian bookshop looked like they’d come straight from the shoot of a Shyam Benegal film. Many reading this will have no idea what that reference means. It means they could be played by Nassiruddin Shah. And they’d tell you why the book you were buying was nonsense and why something else was better. Then while telling you they were very busy, give you an hour-long lecture on the socio-political situation of the country and how everything was going to hell.
The bookshop itself was a crumbling edifice. Backed up on rent, charming, overstuffed, musty, sometimes you’d need a ladder to fetch a copy, a kind of zoo where intellectuals felt safe to roam basking in their social awkwardness. And perhaps find romance with similar animals. Without such places Woody Allen or Satyajit Ray would have no setting to shoot their kind of lovers. In the ’90s, in the golden age of The Barnes & Noble/Starbucksy (and locally Crosswordy/ Landmarky) world, coffee and books made love in a sort of high-end readers’ oasis. The architecture was all book cliché – wood panels, posters of Shakespeare/ Tagore sipping espresso – but in a gigantic four-floor Dubai mall-ish supermarket vibe.
Today, most bookshops are over. Anywhere in the world, except may be for Paris, where they are probably on strike against the internet. The few that remain in India essentially sell headphones and underwear, baby socks, etc. with the customary essential healthy eating guide by a former model with a foreword by Kareena Kapoor. Everyone reads on iPads and phones, while fiddling with 11 other apps.
If Vikram Seth knew one day he’d have to compete with your friend Tejal’s tweet about a dog playing a banjo or your boyfriend’s curt, “sup?” on Whatsapp, while you did online farming, he’d have become an engineer like all parents said we should have.
However, an India bookseller last week raised a billion dollars from Silicon Valley. The Indian media focused naturally on the silly childish stuff, how rich they’ve personally become compared with other rich Bangalore people but missed the thing the CEO Sachin Bansal was desperately trying to say.
Which is that he cannot keep up with demand. He needs to build infrastructure to get stuff to people – delivery warehouses, people on bikes, those Flipkart T shirts, web back-end, whatever else. Like Jeff Bezos, the original book billionaire knows well, Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a post office.
Theirs is a logistics business, warehousing and shipping and delivery. Books are one of the things, but as time has told us, you can buy anything on there – from an entire oven to probably a person with free time. You start with a bookshop online, all quaint and lovely. Eventually, you become an online Macy’s. Books get a corner.
Before they died, as anyone who had ever been to a Crossword-ish mall kind of place can attest, we were not exactly the world’s most die-hard reading populace. As is obvious from what they eventually evolved into. First year, there’d be all sorts of cool writers and new foreign releases. In two or three years, there’d be a copy of a Jobs biography, some Mickey Mehta gym guide DVD, a Wii player and a silver box of kishmish. All on the bestseller rack.
So when Sachin Bansal says he can’t stay up with demand, was that the essential problem? That we were dying to read but only if someone delivered it at home? That we were determined to stay ignorant and illiterate till cash-on-delivery came along?
Surely that wasn’t the problem. Our reading appetite, regardless of the hassle of finding parking to pick up the new Chetan Bhagat, is perhaps the same whether Crossword in a mall kept it or a Flipkart person whispers it to me while I sleep (a worrying thought).
So what are people going crazy about? A quick search will tell you that the biggest-selling item at these online stores are phones and clothes. So Flipkart is now Oberoi mall. That it once may have been Bahri and Sons for the internet is not where its scalable business model lies or what Silicon Valley can afford. There’s double-digit growth in smart phones, not so much in Salman Rushdie.
So in the era of our digital Walmart, books will get some corner floor (area of the webpage). When you get to that corner, you’d get every kind of book you can think of at a tap of a forefinger or by some guy at your door (if Mr Bansal can afford to send him). Which is progress. Getting any information you want was unthinkable or arduous at any other time in our history. Monks and people like that would climb up serious looking mountains and risk lives across ravines and stuff to read some ancient scroll. Someone in heaven must be going “Damn. Only if I had Flipkart when I was writing the Rig Veda…”
But when you give everything to people, as time has told us, it doesn’t make us any wiser. It doesn’t mean people will rush to read the entire oeuvre of Nobel laureates. It just means, it will show us what people really care about – animals doing cute things, candy being crushed, Samsung tablets, and pornography.
So the books corner will get smaller and smaller in Mr Bansal’s new zillion-dollar world. The Bengali/French/British homeless man will close his shop, drink his Scotch, torch his stock shouting obscenities at the digital age. We’d say, I can buy anything any time, books have this corner, stop cribbing old bookshop man.
And in time, the shrinking book corner will become an icon the size of the arrow on a Macbook next to the big photo of the jeans or the charger that’s selling well they’d want you to click on. And it will take longer to fiddle with the little thing than buy a book. And we’ll say hell with it, I wish there was a place you know, where I could just get a book.
