Thursday, July 10, 2008

Oh Culture!

If you live in a North Indian cosmopolitan, you will only hear about Bhojpuri cinema and never really know what it's about. Not so with Kolkata. 'Jaan De Deb Tohar Khatir' ('I'll give my life for you' in Bhojpuri) screams a poster and underneath the words stands a violent looking woman with large blue frightening eyes. Snakes crawl around the title. What a way to attract an audience, I say.

A lot of interest of late seems to have been generated in Kolkata about a genre of fiction newly popular in the subcontinent - graphic novels. Bookstores are full of these. And in the intelligentsia hankering after picture books, newly packaged Phantom and manga seem also seem to be getting picked up. I personally think the 'intellectuals' have begun to realize that pictures in books are not such a bad thing after all. Kids have known it for years - and now its time for the old and wise to delve into illustrated literature.

College Street is one of those places that old Kolkata residents speak of in hushed and reverent voices, their eyes overcome with a happy tear or two. Let me describe this place to you. Get down somewhere around Presidency college (Calcutta University) and there it is. Miles to your left and miles to your right, on both sides of the road stand stalls upon stalls, piles upon piles, readers upon sellers and vice versa, of books. There is probably a fancy statistic somewhere about how many times you could travel to the moon and back if you put all these books end to end. New tomes and second hand flipped pages seem to fly about with fairy wings of their own. Stacks jump in your way if you try to walk away from all this too fast. The musty smell of books, made more intoxicating by the humid heat of Kolkata in July ensnares you. Mysterious narrow paths transport you to another world where engineering literature and the English canon spill out of small and ancient shops. Marxist writing, computer science, political theory, Sigmund Freud, Bio-technology and 'How to study for IIT' line the way like cobbled stones.

If that's not your style though, you could always take refuge in the sanctified, cool environs of an Oxford Book Store on Park Street. But then where's the old school glamour in that?

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