HELLO JI!
YOU CAN’T FAKE BEING A BOOK LOVER
Vedika Pinto and Vikrant Massey in Musafir Café. Are they really book lovers as the storyline suggests? Screengrab from YouTube.
Readers of a certain vintage might recall books that were considered must-reads by those who had intellectual aspirations – carefully avoiding the word pretentious here! – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Catcher in the Rye and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Along with books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The titles have changed over time, other authors are trendy, but being viewed as someone whose entertainment of choice is reading comes with a certain cachet. Of course, it is associated with a certain imagery, too. Someone who reads for fun is depicted in popular movies and shows as slightly nerdy, absent-minded, almost always with glasses. But always sweet, and never the villain!
The Hindi romantic drama series Musafir Café on Netflix has such a person in a lead role – without the glasses.
Vikrant Massey plays Chander, an IT professional who nurtures dreams of running a café in the hills. One with lots of books, where people will come just to hang out and chat, to connect over books – like they did with his grandfather at a tiny bookstore in old Delhi.
I love the premise – until they get to the books. The several issues I have with the series include the totally unnecessary cliffhanger they ended it with, but that pales in comparison to the way they treat books in the show.
That Chander loves books is evident in the shelves lining his home. He loves hanging out at a book store/library. Sudha, a free-spirited lawyer and Chander’s love interest, asks him to name his favourite book and he pulls Pride & Prejudice off the shelf. How absolutely lovely is that, I think, a guy who is unabashedly a fan of Jane Austen!
The swoon-worthy moment doesn’t last long. Because when he asks her to name her favourite read, she picks a title by Kafka. At which library or book store are you likely to find both the books in the same section?
And when it comes to replacing the books on the shelves, she just plunks them on top, any which where. Even if one were to attribute it to her thinking library staff were there to pick up and sort out books, she does it again at the café Chander does eventually open.
I am aware of the fact that not everyone is as obsessive about putting books back in their spot – and not everyone arranges their collection alphabetically, though I highly recommend it! But she doesn’t even attempt to replace the copy where she found it – one imagines Chander has a system of his own to display his books.
Holding a copy of Kafka doesn’t make one a reader. Breathing in the scent, reading it, and then putting it back with care, exactly where it belongs, does. And you never see anyone doing that in this series.
How different are they, then, from people who arrange books by the colour of their spines? Or display strategically-placed expensive coffee table books? Not kindred spirits, as Anne might say. Anne who? LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, that’s who!
Shagorika Easwar