How I got so smart

I bought all my books from raddiwalas till I began working as a salesman in a bookstore in my early twenties. Before I landed the job, I did not know that bookstores like Strand or Granth existed. Most of what I read, and I was a very promiscuous reader, was dictated by what people read in my neighbourhood or wherever it was that I was visiting. This is how I read my first Barbara Taylor Bradford (A woman of substance), my first George Orwell (Animal Farm and 1985), and PG Wodehouse (Big Money). There was no telling what I would stumble on Swami Vivekananda's lectures, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Guy Lombardo's massive tome on Shyness (Did not help me at all), Napoleon Hill's Think and grow rich and Reader's Digest condensed books.u00a0u00a0

This is also where I discovered the very first books that described the sexual act in my early teens. We had no cable TV back then and not everyone had DVD player that allowed one to watch blue films. Thank God for Nancy Friday, Harold Robbins and Charles Devereux. It was among these dusty shelves of dog-eared books that I discovered that James Hadley Chase had nothing to offer beyond the picture of bikini-clad girls who looked like they were first cousins to the MiD DAY mate. If I was lucky, I could also get old issues of Debonair, Fantasy and Human Digest ufffd what one writer famously calls one-hand books.

Once, a friend and I found Rs 500 lying on the road and we split it between us. I don't know what he did with his money, I went to Chakala market and bought this massive pile of books. Some 10 or 12 ufffd I don't remember what the books were but I remember feeling very grand on my way home. I have never felt richer in my life.u00a0

The rules of buying from raddiwalas have remained the same. Keep a poker face and do not pay more than 20 per cent of the cover price.

And I continue to buy from them but not as often as I would earlier because my wife keeps reminding me about how the house is bursting with books. But now, when I recall all those years, when my pockets were empty, I went through the often disorderly stacks of books, for hours at times, and took my time to pick what I wanted, I realise those summer hours spent in front of ramshackle rusting shelves is the closest I have come to satori.