by I was away this weekend in a small town on the Andhra Pradesh – Karnataka border – one of those thousands of towns across India racked by identity crisis – literally, as the journey takes you across AP and Karnataka in turns every few minutes (this happened to me in MP – UP too) – now you see boards in Kannada and now in Telugu and now again in both AND Urdu too!
Anyway, the point is that as I was waiting for the train to arrive at the sation (on my way back to Bombay yesterday), I browsed through the small book stall on the platform. This guy did not have any newspapers in English – Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Urdu, yes, but English, no.
Neither did he seem to have any English magazines – when he proudly dug out one for me – the latest issue of Cosmopolitan! Obviously small town rural India’s priorities too centre around ‘eight ways to keep your man hot’ (or whatever, now that summer is here).
I am still trying to understand this – and while on this, will a Hindi edition of Cosmo sell as well?
was this station guntakal by any chance? just curious …
– s.b.