Books about the land where I come from....

I have finally succumbed to my temptation and bought 2 more books ( I was going to wait a while after my last purchase in the last week of December 2009)- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. I had begun reading ' A Suitable Boy'  on Google Books and though it had a limited preview with missing pages, my hours at work (read : no work) would pass off amazingly well reading through Seth's story. I then realized it had some 1400 odd pages and with my dry eye problem, I realized I wasnt going to be able to enjoy it as much as I could with its book version. So last week, I logged onto Amazon and moved the book into my shopping cart. At around 14 $ , it was going to be a good buy ( If you decided to get quantitive then its almost 1$ per 100 pages which is pretty economical right?) and worth the read since the characters Seth has woven his story around are so well defined, you feel like you are living amongst them.

So having added the book to my cart, I was looking for something else to make the total to 25 and avail free shipping. I can sometimes be thrifty and try to save money on things but eventually land up spending more. I think thats precisely what smart marketing personnel take advantage of and lure us into devilish ideas like Free Shipping!!! So instead of spending those $4 on shipping, I went ahead and bought another book roughly worth the same price but thereby allowing me the free shipping catch that I had so fallen for. But thinking retrospectively, I dont think I have wasted my money, though I agree I fell for the trap ( You must be wondering by now why such a melodrama over a small thing like Free Shipping...but then where I come from melodrama sells like hot cakes and can earn you some real good publicity) . I had landed up buying Sacred Games - a book by the author Vikram Chandra whose past books have been about my city Mumbai and that is probably a big reason why I decided to buy the book. My earlier experience of reading Shantaram by Gregory Roberts( I havent finished it as yet... ) and Maximum City by Suketu Mehta , the former with Mumbai as a backdrop for a major part of the story while the latter exposing the dark underbelly of this megacity, have been awesome mainly because the writing in both stories paints the real city that Mumbai is.

So it wasnt an irony when I decided to read Sacred Games before A Suitable Boy when I received the shipment yesterday. Although the book is a work of fiction, the curiosity to revisit Mumbai through the tale was difficult to subdue. I did not get to read a lot but I was charmed with the first few pages and I am ready to devor the 1000 pages that remain. I now have two books that are big enough to keep me occupied for a couple of months and I am really looking forward to flipping through the pages of stories about families post-partition of India and the intertwining lives of police-gangsters in Mumbai. And that too when I have yet to finish Shashi Tharoor's book on India as an emerging power , " The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cell Phone". So looks like am in total love with my country and city and am missing them a lot. Its obvious when you havent seen your land, your parents and your younger brother for 2 long years!