Please, sir. May I have a kilo of books?

I kid you not, boys and girls. Here’s what the ad with a black borderline in the Mumbai Mirror of Wednesday, 13 March 2013 (page 3, top left hand corner), said. And, I quote verbatim:

BOOKS BY WEIGHT

New & Pre-owned Books

Buy Books by the Kilo.

Rs.200/- per Kilo for Children’s Books & Mills & Boon, Rs.100/- per Kilo for all other Books.

Minimum Purchase of ½ Kilo and In Multiples of 100 Grams there-of [sic]

All subjects included

One million books will be displayed during the course of this exhibition.

Venue:

Shri Sunderbai Hall

Nathibai Thakersey Marg, Opp. Churchgate Station

Behind Income Tax Office, Mumbai 400002

Tel: 95942 21040

Date: from Wed. 6^th to Sun. 24^th March 20013.

Time: 10 am to 8 pm

Sundays Open

CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED

YOU CAN GET 9 LADYBIRD OR 7 PICTURE

BOOKS IN Rs.200/- A KILO

YOU CAN GET 4 FICTION OR 1 COFFEE

TABLE BOOK IN Rs.100/- A KILO

*We do not provide plastic bags please bring your own carry bags.

My guess? A lawyer (if not full-fledged, then an intern) – not a copywriter – wrote the text. (S)he lacked finesse, forgot to proofread (“there-of”). Also, please mark the euphemistic legalese (“pre-owned” for “second hand”, a usage borrowed from car trade). At least, they told a fair amount of truth if not the whole truth. I noticed that some of the books on display had on the front fly page a borrower’s record sheet, a familiar presence in library books. Also the pages of a lot of books were on the verge of yellowing.

The exhibition space was fairly well packed, a rare occurrence on a weekday afternoon. The shoppers were mostly young, enthusiastically lugging their shopping baskets behind them, jostling, pushing, jamming the aisles as most Indians are wont to do. A majority were buying mass market fiction, children’s books and computer-related books. In the former category, the best of the chaotically scattered lot seemed to be Grisham and Crichton.

As for me, after two hours of plowing through the tumult, I settle for three books, two hard-bound and one paperback. The first one, Molly Weir’s Spinning Like A Peerie (Lomond Books, Edinburgh, 1999), is the paperback sequel to Trilogy of Scottish Childhood. http://bit.ly/10T508G">http://bit.ly/10T508Ga>.  

The second book to catch my eye and fancy was Joseph Roth’s The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-39 (Granta Books, London, 2044). Roth was a hotshot German newspaperman who quit the Weimar Republic and relocated in France. His collection of essays (or, belles lettres, in deference to their vintage) would be worth reading, I thought.

My third purchase was a quirky collection of misprints, typos and other howlers: Martin Toseland’s A Steroid Hit The Earth (Portico Books, London, 2008). None of my esteemed fellow shoppers would have spared a glance for my eclectic and weird choices, I’m sure. Well, well, well. C’est la vie.

My rich haul did not cost much. Tipping the weighing scale at 1.2 kg, it left my wallet lighter by Rs.120/-. The other shoppers in the cashier’s queue had much heavier loads to carry and pay for. This masterstroke of exhibition marketing was the brainwave of Butterfly Books. Only someone who deals in books by the container loads could have thought of selling them by weight. Other booksellers ought to follow suit with suitably modified baits.  

The secret word is “Fiddlesticks”.

Along with ‘Free’, ‘New’, ‘instant’, ‘easy to master’, ‘speedy’, ‘1-minute’ and other magic words and phrases, ‘secret’ too is deemed to be a very potent word in marketing and advertising. An action-triggering word. A very, very persuasive word. The secret of being rich. The lazy man’s secret. Victoria’s secret. Ming’s secret. Official secret. The secret of success. The secret of happiness. Beauty secret. The secret ingredient. Secret language. The secret word. Secret service. Secret agent. Secret society. Secret conspiracy. Secret ritual. Secret societies. The secret handshake. The Secret Doctrine by HP Blavatsky. (It’s about theosophy and … the spiritual evolution of the universe and mankind; science, symbolism, myths, reincarnation… (says the blurb). http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd-hp.htm. The secret life of Walter Mitty. All hogwash except maybe the last one. It was lived in his mind and he told no one about it. The ultimate secret is there’s no secret. The secret logic that helped me to arrive at this earth-shaking dénouement is simply this. If something is known to more than one person or revealed to someone else, it’s no longer a secret. Take “secret” with a large pinch of salt is my humble suggestion. P.S.: Can someone tell me the secret of why the participants of Miss Tibet Pageant 2006 http://www.misstibet.com/ in Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh) – probably thousands or at least hundreds of miles away from sea – are prancing around in swimsuits? My off-the-cuff guess is the fall out of the deep inroads made by American cultural brainwashing. Fall from grace, sort of.

Hitler’s Cross. Now Shablok’s, too?

Everyone’s cross at Hitler’s Cross. Five mondo honchos of Mumbai’s Pee Three swore they won’t eat there. http://www.cybernoon.com/DisplayArticle.asp?section=fromthepress&subsection=opinions&xfile=August2006_opinions_standard990. They’re all foodies, mind you. Were I Punit Shablok, that would have me really, really worried. His reason for choosing for his new restaurant with a hookah parlour attached the name that’s leaving everyone cross-eyed seems to be a convolutedly thought out positional gambit. “This is one name that will stay in people’s minds,” he told Reuters. “We are not promoting Hitler… we want to tell people we are different in the way he was different.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14121008/. Careful, dude. You don’t want to be different in the way Hitler was different unless you’re ready to be certified nuts and consigned to the snake pit. If I remember my Ries & Trout, the Hitler’s Cross promo task force seems to have applied the Positioning theory correctly. Only the window of the mind they chose to open is the one everyone would rather keep permanently boarded up. What intrigues me is this, though. Why would the Hitler’s Cross promo task force assume that Hitler would be remembered as ‘different’ (‘remarkable’?) by people, mostly Indians, who live and work in the Kharghar neighbourhood or take a detour to the restaurant on their way to Pune or Mumbai? Young people who chose to eat there seemed to recall Hitler as an evil man but didn’t think that was reason enough to deny the restaurant their patronage. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2346673. Now, that sounds perfectly rational to me. And, totally non-hypocritical to boot as compared to certain politically correct foodie pronouncements mentioned earlier. The Cross(over?) incidence also reiterates the wisdom of the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Else, could a new eatery in sleepy Kharghar ever aspire to be the irritant in the world’s eye? One more point about Hitler’s Cross is worth noting. In August 1920, the soon-to-be Füehrer was working as an artist and understood the power of visual symbols. He adopted the reverse Swastika from the Finnish Air Force whose military symbol it had been since 1918 and tilted it. “The effect was as if we had dropped a bomb,” he wrote. Shablok could vouch for that, I reckon.