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Bombay Samachar Marg


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Today’s car outside Samachar’s office.

 My first introduction to Bombay Samachar was in Bangalore’s City Market. In an earlier avatar of mine managing a machine shop and a factory making reinforced plastics in my home town - Bangalore, I used to buy tools and stuff from a Saifee Tools (one of several), a Bohri shopkeeper who used to read it a day later, in Bangalore, in the mid 90s, nostalgic about his hometown. There were many Mumbaikars in Bangalore then who had escaped the hate unleashed by Bal Thackeray and LK Advani/Vajpayee’s Hindutva mobs and Bangalore was a refuge. (Not just Bhiwandi and Malegaon) . Bangalore’s real estate prices in those days went up because of Mumbai businesses shifting there as a safety net. They used to read Bombay Samachar and Bombay newspapers in Bangalore. Also outside KC Das on Church Street, you would get Bombay newspapers (businessmen and ad agencies bought them for ads) (in Mumbai, Churchgate station is where you used to get Bangalore/chennai/ Kol/hyd newspapers until 2005) you could get Bombay newspapers. The man outside KC Das, if my memory serves right, started the Magazine store, that one with tonnes of magazines and awesome cats on the Church Street opposite NASA pub a decade or more back. Church Street now has evolved into the Mecca of books in India but it didn’t happen overnight. People who read books lived and walked up and down and hopped from pub to pub I guess, for decades, there were other premiers on that street.

Yesterday's car. 



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