Book mark

Once upon a time, if people asked for directions to Blossom Book House, you told them which end of Church Street it was on, and named the bowling alley bang opposite. Nowadays, directions take the form &ldquothree doors up from Blossom&rsquos&rdquo or summat.

The bookshop is Bangalore legend just as much as it is landmark. Visitors will hear multiple versions of how the owner, Mayi Gowda, began a roadside operation specialising in second-hand books while still an engineering student, how it turned into a hole-in-the-wall and then a two-room establishment before crossing the road to gradually occupy all the floors of a tall building.
Today, visiting Blossom&rsquos is to constantly go back and forth between new and old &mdash and not just in terms of the books you might buy. Feed from surveillance cameras may converge in a not-to-miss montage above the heads of those who bill, without cooing, on the ground floor. And yet, old-fashioned practices like discounts on new books and buybacks on second-hand titles continue to survive here. They have a website (blossombookhouse.com) which allows you, with great even-handedness, to search in vain or find and buy. Mayi Gowda himself is far more reliable &mdash I&rsquove lost count of the number of times he has pulled from his shelves with a gentle smile the book I had asked for and forgotten about. If there is a Bangalore way of doing business, this is probably it.
Some five years ago, I imposed a moratorium. No more shopping at Blossom&rsquos, because I was running out of space and because it was bad for my soul. Because lusting after a book was now merely a five-minute hunt, a matter of sniffing the author out on alphabetically arranged shelves and buying, inevitably, an armload of her books. Where was the narrative around the book, the chase, the romance This reason had all my friends in splits. 
Over time, the moratorium has eased into four or five annual raids. I end up buying the same number of books &mdash too many &mdash and I invariably run into some buddy on the way out. I continue to rock in moral agony, they continue to roll about the floor cackling.