In 2020, as India began to unlock after four phases of nationwide lockdown, I sent a copy of my Gujarati translation of Arun Kolatkar’s Kal...
In 2020, as India began to unlock after four phases of nationwide lockdown, I sent a copy of my Gujarati translation of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems to a bibliophile friend and waited for three days, after the courier service confirmed the delivery, to hear from him. That long silence of someone whom I had known to be a voracious reader, one who would stay up all night to finish a book, clearly intrigued me, so much so that I could not help enquiring with him on phone.
He said he had put the envelope in a three-day mandatory quarantine and not touched it so far. This physical distancing of a book from its reader metaphorically summed up for me the crisis the publishing industry was undergoing on account of the most mercurial and macabre pandemic.
This friend of mine, like many of the old-school readers, related to a book in terms of its tactile and olfactory features, something he would be scared to indulge in now even after the quarantine period. His behaviour finds official confirmation in the findings of Nielsen Book India’s survey, according to which COVID-19 brought about gradational shift in the reader’s preferred modes of purchasing books. For a locked-down...
