Endless walk through the book stalls...

CHENNAI BOOK FAIR 2017

Akash Sajikumar, II MA ENGLISH

Books are always a delight to feed on whenever you want. I am not that kind of a voracious reader but I do love to add on to my huge shelf which I dedicate for the collection of my favourite books. So when I heard about the Chennai Book Fair 2017 I was pretty much excited about it. It was on a Pongal holiday that some of my friends and myself, we decided to roam around the city with an intention of going to the book fair. The fair was organised by the Book Sellers and Publishers Association of South India at St. George Anglo- Indian Higher Secondary School near Chetpet, which was like an hour from my college.

Only after reaching the place did we realise that it was a huge book fair with lots of people from children to great grandfathers swarming in and out of the place. It was like the book lovers all over Chennai finding a place to meet together with the utlimate aim of grabbing their favourites from the numerous books stalls over there. We digged our way towards the stalls in the midst of the huge crowd and successfully got into place.

The stalls were orderly arranged in neat rows so as to make the searching easy. We roamed around the whole place; in fact, the smell of fresh pages welcomed me into it. There was this huge collection of Enid Blyton series which I used to read a lot when I was a kid which took me back to my school library for a while. I was fascinated by the writings of Osho and my primary intention was to get a copy of his book The Art of Living before leaving the place.

As I had intended, I found a huge shelf full of Osho’s collection at the Harper Collins with this book on the top. There was also a huge collection of Agatha Christie spread over which is a little confusing to pick from.

From there we went into Om Shakthi stall which was one among the second hand book stores. As expected, there was a huge rush over there and to select books from there was a gordian task. But I got a few classics from there for reasonable prices which was more than enough.

Apart from the book stalls there were stalls put up for food around the place. Endless walk through the book stores had drawn us towards the food stalls. The huge sighs of tiredness was replaced with funny conversations within ourselves while we were filling up our tummies. It was a wonderful day with a lot of exposure to a variety of books and authors. On our way back to college we had a conversation in the train about the fair exchanging the books that we had bought from the fair within ourselves.