Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Book Fair

Last week some of my FB friends visited World Book Fair in New Delhi. It dawned upon me that I have not been to one for a very long time. And..... I just remembered having seen a tiny banner pointing to a book fair "Sahitya Darbaar" close to my place. The fair was running for almost a week then and I didnt visit thinking it wouldn't have anything of my interest. Such small fairs usually sport only cookery or self-help or religious books... I've enough cookery books to experiment and the other two don't fit my taste.

Saturday afternoon, when Kuhu was in a mood to play with her grandpa and nothing (and no one ) demanded my urgent attention, I decided to check on the book fair. It was wonderful to be surrounded by books.... virtually no one around. Outwardly it looked like a book fair for Marathi books and so it was with an exception of few management & self-help books. However, the kids section had a good mix of Marathi  and English titles. I enjoyed flipping through the books, reading some, looking for some and finding treasures. Here is what I picked -



I shared this with my friends and a couple of them wanted some titles that seemed interesting...so I headed to the fair again on Sunday, this time with Kuhu. She was so excited to see the books, some of which she already has and wanted me to read to her there. She is learning to differentiate between Roman and Devnagari script and had fun recognizing each book's script. She even tried to remember if she had the English or Marathi version of the books. One grandma was looking at the "Yash" series for her grandchildren and was surprised to hear Kuhu talk animatedly about those books.

I'm glad I visited Sahitya Darbaar else would have missed on some good reads.... more on that later.