Second to None

[...]hand-yet still quite expensive-electronic goods hawked on the internet are invariably described as "pre-owned," never "second-hand." Generations of students imbibed with the habits of thrift and austerity, before the internet and search engines took over our lives, made us "aspirational"-a key word in the New India-and rendered reading books and close study of texts an irrelevance, spent a good part of their youth at second-hand bookshops during their school and college years. When I lived in Gamdevi, Mumbai (then Bombay), during 1975-82, and bicycled to my workplace, then in the Fort market area, some of my fondest and most thrilling memories revolve around the accidental finds and encounters in unpretentious second-hand bookshops, which were often little more than patches of pavement piled with tattered old books and magazines spread out on a sheet of tarpaulin, mainly in the Victoria Terminus (VT) area, before I discovered the world of books around Flora Fountain.