Nirvana

Bangalore Book Festival - 2007 is being held at Palace Grounds (towards Mekhri Circle) between October 12th and 21st 2007. I was there on Saturday along with my parents in the evening - the setup is similar to last year and the entry tickets cost around Rs 40/- Unlike last year, I did not see a large crowd at the stalls and it appeared to me that the number of stalls were also fewer.

Nevertheless, you could find a few of the famous book houses like Blossoms, Sankars and Fountainhead at the festival. Blossoms @ Church Street has turned out to be a popular place to buy books because of their book return policy and also the variety of books they stock. I was looking for bargains at the book stalls and was quite letdown as the books seemed to be a repeat of last year’s fest.

Not that I was specifically looking for any book (apart from Michael Lewis, “BlindSide“) but did manage to find three @ throwaway prices - Tom Peters Seminar , Silicon Sky and Competing on Internet Time

I considered buying “Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki (I have given up on receiving the autographed book from Startups.in contest) but then decided to borrow it from my friend.

It was surprising to see stalls dedicated to leftist (communist) books on Che Guevera, Marxism, Lenin among others. Also prominent were stalls promoting religious books on Islam and Hinduism, philosophy. Oxford and few other publishers were present too displaying books on SW, technology, engineering textbooks etc.

Watch out for Surya Book Fair stall towards the end for interesting books - although you may have to rummage through the haphazard arrangements of books piled on top of each other

Worth a visit, I would say.

Books I have bought over the past couple of weeks include Jose Saramago’s Seeing, My years with General Motors by Alfred Sloan and Practice of Management by Peter Drucker.

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• “Nature produces enough for every man’s need, not for everyman’s greed”  - M.K.Gandhi

• I shudder at the thought of driving in Bangalore in five years time. Thanks to all the MNCs like Cisco, IBM, Philips et.al pumping in billions of dollars of investment in this mad, crowded city, things are going to get more worse pretty soon. Why the hell do they have to expand in Bangalore, can’t they move to some God forsaken place ? Sheer Madness!

• Where the hell are all the sparrows, I havent seen one in Bangalore for a long time. As a kid, sparrows and crows were abound and your granny used to narrate your favorite story about the crow and the sparrow. Too sad that we dont see them anymore.

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