Books, Facebook and Paulo Coelho…
I was a avid reader as a kid. Certainly not the literary genius kinds, my genre most often involved thrillers. Thinking of it, it is a good way to get into the habit of reading. Start reading the kind of genre you like and do not directly try and immerse yourself into heavy duty stuff. So, I read as much as I could whenever I could. It was my favorite pastime. It was like having a friend with you at all times and being transported to a completely different world in a jiffy. It was about knowing people and perspectives without actually meeting with them. The recluse in me found it perfect.
I would spend all night with a good book, forcibly keeping my eyes open and slept only during the wee hours of the morning. When I found a good book, I went ahead and read as many works as I could of the same author. If you notice my book collection, I won’t have just one book of an author.
So, from thrillers to rustic homely RK Narayan’s works, my book collection steadily increased. It is during medical school that I chanced upon Paulo Coelho's. ‘The Alchemist’. My roomie had borrowed it from a colleague and I in turn from her, the same way I made my batchmate part with ‘The Godfather’ before he could even begin reading it.
Now ,’The Alchemist’ is a very abstract way of story telling. If you take it literally, you will assume the man has gone cuckoos. It’s probably one of his most popular works which needless to say, I loved and like it was my habit, went on to explore the rest of his works.
Growing up, the sourcing of books could either be from the local library, purchasing the paperback ones or buying the second hand ones. The second hand ones that the local scrap dealer sold could be purchased in kilos. It was trash as far as they were concerned and pure gold for an avid reader. It didn’t matter which one you picked, the more it weighed, the more you paid. The issue was most of the second hand ones would be fragile and falling apart kinds and most often you didn’t get the one you wanted. As far as libraries were concerned, the book hoarder in me had some kind of a pathological attachment to my books. I still do. I didn’t just want to read them, I wanted to own them. Hence that option was out.
The next feasible option(feasible because paper back ones were slightly costly and so it limited how much you could read), were the pirated ones. Now, I didn’t really go about looking for pirated copies of books but did chance upon them once or twice around Churchgate(South Bombay). I found ‘The Fountainhead’ there and read it only to realize that the climax was missing. That was the last time that I picked up a wayside copy of a novel.
Sometimes things you look for have a way of finding you. Precisely, the theme of ‘The Alchemist’. As it so happened, during one those Paulo Coelho book reading spells, the vehicle I was travelling in stopped at the traffic signal and a street urchin approached me waving gleefully a ‘pack of three’ of Paulo’s work at me. Ecstatic, I paid him and proceeded to devour them in the coming weeks.
Long past the incident, I was following the author on Facebook. It so happened that the man was in Mumbai for a visit and as luck would have it , his plush motorcade happened to stop at a traffic signal. On being beckoned, he rolled down the window to be greeted by, you guessed right, a street urchin. The kid was waving pirated copies of his own books at him. I am assuming the man had a mini stroke but like all westerners, he played down his displeasure. He took to Facebook to pen a post about the incident, photo et al and tried to be all nice about it.
Guilty as charged, I soon unfollowed Paulo Coelho. Didn’t want any more of the second hand embarrassment. As someone rightly said, “If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, you will know you have arrived only when one of those street urchins sell one of your pirated copies”.
PS: I buy only authentic copies now…
