Book Hunting

One thing , that is difficult to get in Kerala are books , some books are never to be found , i had searched for some books for several years and still not found ...

i thought the situation would be better in metropolitan Bangalore , but here the situation is only very slightly better .Perhaps it is a problem with India as a whole ..?


the most frustrating things is that not enough information is available , even on the internet , like , there is no way to easily find out if a particular book is available with in India.

some of the books , by Indian writers themselves are not available here ... ,

like , Chandrasekhar's Principia for the Common reader , Chandrasekhar , was one of our greatest scientists , but his book is not available here ...


I wish if there was an Indian Amazon.com ,

We do have some online book stores that service here , but they are notoriously bad in quality of service , and in the selection of stuff available.

Amazon itself seems to have some establishment here , but curiously they don't have a service that is especially tailored for Indian customers , and if we buy through it we have to pay the US prices and the international shipping costs , what a raw deal.

The greatest joys of going to bookstores is the serendipitous discoveries one makes , sometimes one buys a book , that one haven't heard of before , that one didn't have any thought of buying ,
but , like the love that occurs at first sight, the book attaches to ones mind , and one has to buy it...

last time i went to tvm , there was a book fair going on there , a rather small thing , making people wonder why the Vice President himself come all the way to inaugurate it , i bought
Dickens's Bleak House for rs 100 , and a condensed version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire for rs 200 ,

i would say 100 rs is not a high price for the experience of reading Bleak House.