Aiming at books. Shooting readers.
Are you seeing more posts about books and booksellers here on this blog that documents the streets of Mumbai? Yes. Like this photo of a book stall set up by a publisher in the school, my son goes to. There is more to this story…
Towards the end of the last year, there was a big change in my life. A change of job also changed my mode of the commute from the BEST bus to the local train. These days, I travel a long distance by train and the positive side of this change is that I now get more time to read.
However, old habits die hard. I still carry my camera with me, and my eyes are always looking around for interesting things to shoot and one thing that I am shooting more of now is other people reading, book stalls in local train stations and in other places.
Following a train of thought and building a story
This blog has been shooting a series called #BookshelvesOfMumbai for nearly a decade now. Whenever I go to a place with an interesting bookshelf or chance upon one that is interesting, I would shoot a photograph and post it here. However, since the beginning of the year, I have become a little more interested than the usual about documenting this thread of thought.
Books and reading people, a few observations:
- Newspaper reading is down but not out
- Newspaper readership fluctuates. For e.g.: it has increased in the last few weeks because people are hungry for information about the terrorist attack in J&K, the air battles that followed and the pre-election noise
- People don’t read magazines anymore
- A few AH Wheeler and Co stalls on the Western Line have closed down
Overall, fewer people seem to read and I hope to spot trends and document it using photographs on a new blog which is also called Footpath Bookshop. like the book store where I sell my digital photo books.
