Books are no longer fashionable. Data shows it. People show it. Reading things longer than X posts have been consigned to that old curio shop where only aristocrats with time and taste drop by. And, yet, West Bengal seems to buck the trend. Not necessarily in reading but the importance it's been giving to bookstalls in general, and stalls selling 'left-wing' books in particular. At a time when propaganda comes streaming on phones, one would have thought a pamphlet on Marx would have its thin pages fluttering in the October breeze. But it turns out that friends in and of the West Bengal government have found a special hobby this festive season: dismantling these bookstalls. With Yogic bulldozers tearing down 'Lal salaam' bookstalls, you'd be wondering whether communist parties in this country really have only 8 seats out of the 543 total.

While the object may be to obliterate any communistic literature from the face of the earth, the fact that the bookstall-wrecking has put a spotlight on many of these titles may be lost upon the ardent deconstructionalists. As well as the 'secret' that people can buy books online. So, whether it's Bhagat Singh's 'Why I am an Atheist' or Che Guevara's 'The Motorcycle Diaries', the bookstall uninstallers are bringing these publications to the notice of a generation that otherwise wouldn't have heard of them.