During the last week of December 2021, when the pandemic was still lurking around, I had this urge to shop for books, may be influenced by this accumulation culture of our times.
I booked a cab and waited. The road was full of dead leaves, strewn solid waste, and a rumbling ash-coloured transformer. I did think about walking back, but this practice of starting off made me wait.
The cab’s seat was hot. I adjusted my mask and tapped at the little bottle of sanitizer in my jeans pocket. I looked out of the window for the usual scenes: dust or suspended particulate matter to be exact, mass of people as if nothing had happened, chaos, and long lines of restless vehicles around traffic signals. A brownish layer of winter pollution hung over the city.
The bookshop had moved to a new spot and I had to walk in a bit. It looked like a kid’s play school. Groups of people occupied most of the footpaths. The crowd was chaotic, dressed mostly in black, young and old, and undisciplined as if there was no tomorrow. I exchanged a few books that I could not read because of the very small font size.
As I had expected, most of the books in my memory were missing from the shelves. The display section had all the hyped, new books. I tried to find a rare gem among the mass of books. Nothing. Someone was talking loudly about books, the books she had read, the books she had disliked, and the books she wanted her companion to read. The same old books again and conversations about the same old stuff again and again. The world refused to change. I stayed closer to the windows.
I was sweating on the way back and I was thinking about the crowd. I thought it was out of place. I felt a bit awkward about the crowd in that street and I thought that the crowd had no purpose to exist there in that pattern and shape on that day and at that time. I wanted to ask an old man what he was doing there in a wheelchair amidst the mass of people. Coffee shops were full. The suspended particulate matter had already increased my histamine levels. The traffic chaos was back.
Back home, I read about how people voted. While there were interesting data like the increased number of women voters, voter turnouts not affecting outcomes as expected, and the role of media in voting, the reason why voters were missing from a city like Bengaluru needed more explanations.
I am yet to read all the other chapters in the book. May be, I will write another post on the book later.
Did the chapter make me wise or shook me out of dreams? Not at all. There may be umpteen reasons why people vote in a particular way and choose not to vote. But do they have clear choices? Choices that they are sure of?
Meta Critic 