All over the world bookshop owners are looked upon with respect and unlike other traders they are not just ‘a bania’.
Owners of old bookshops in Delhi, Chennai, Lucknow and other cities are knowledgeable and aware of the culture of place apart from literatteurs and literature. Unfortunately at Variety Book Shop at New Market in Bhopal, it is just the opposite.
It has a good collection of books in English and also some Hindi books kept in a corner but the shop owner is surely falls outside the category of the bookshop owners described above.
Bad manners, snobbish attitude, a lack of education and absolute ‘bad-tameezi’, that’s all you might get to experience at the Variety Book House. Though a bookshop but you can’t touch a book or magazine as if it is a vegetable shop where you come from house thinking of buying the particular vegetable.
I wonder how many people hate this shop but still tolerate the behaviour, perhaps, it is because of lack of alternative. I wish there was a section against ill-mannered shop-owners also in Indian Penal Code or Consumers Act.
