A strange exchange of books

Rishabh Kochhar

To beat the blues of staying at home all day, I succumbed to taking part in an ‘online book exchange’ doing the rounds on the social media accounts of my friends. Details were hard to understand at first, and eluded me until I spent hours crouched over my dusty whiteboard trying to solve it. Graduating as an engineer had finally come in handy, and I was roaring to be a part of the exchange, easily the most interesting that had happened to me since the pandemic began.

I had my doubts, though. For one, it involved sending a copy of your favourite book to a complete stranger, and then waiting for a series of people to continue the chain, till you became a stranger for them and received some books in return, from complete strangers. The pessimist that I am, I wondered if I would receive any books. But taking a leap of faith, I sent a copy of my favourite, Jeffrey Archer’s Eleventh Commandment, to a stranger. Days later, I was astonished when the first book arrived for me — a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers! And soon followed another 10 books that I had never in my wildest dreams imagined I would receive. Over the next two weeks, the doorbell rang as if it were already my birthday. Books kept pouring in, ranging from Dr Abdul Kalam’s autobiography and a hardcover copy of a John Grisham novel, to the Bronte Sisters’ Jane Eyre and a bestselling Japanese thriller. For me, this was better than Diwali, minus the calories! I even gave up on my afternoon siestas, ready to open the door in case another book was delivered.

Odd as it might sound, there is something intimate about exchanging books with strangers. By sharing a book with someone, I believe we end up sharing a part of our soul with them. Sending a book to my benefactor, I wondered if she would enjoy the same parts of the novel that I enjoyed, and laugh at the same subtleties that tickled my funny bone, or relate to the eccentricities of a character the way I did. This is one of the reasons why I still prefer borrowing books from libraries over buying them — borrowing books gives them a life of their own, and a shared ownership of our lives that one cannot buy in a bookstore. But most of all, this brought in a lot of positivity in all our lives, in perhaps the simplest and most elegant way.

Posting about the book exchange on social media brought me closer to many old friends, with whom I had lost touch owing to the busy schedules we all had before Covid spoilt our plans. It triggered long discussions about post-Covid plans to visit Tosh Valley in Himachal Pradesh, trying out snake wine in Vietnam, and an extensive exchange of recipes.

I have already read two books from my newly gifted collection and hope to devour the others soon.

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