Sometimes we seem to wait for things to fade out of our lives so that we can mourn them, because mourning them is more fashionable than celebrating them, because the elegies we compose make us appear caring — even though in reality we aren’t.
What better example than bookshops. From time to time we shed tears on their disappearance from the landscape of our lives; we lend shoulder to one another during this collective mourning; we reminisce, we ruminate. Emotional pieces are penned — and shared widely — each time a legendary bookshop shuts down. Such pieces generate sadness and anger, and one tries to find the villain behind such closures, little realising that the villain is none other than us. If bookshops are shutting down, that’s because we’ve long stopped going there. An owner of a once-busy bookshop isn’t going to keep his business running just to maintain continuity in your life; he too has a family to feed and expenses to meet.
The bookshop — and its closure — is quickly forgotten as something else turns up to tug at our hearts; it could be the demolition of a once-popular cinema hall. Suddenly, again, there’s a collective outpouring of sadness and anger. How your parents, after getting married, watched their first movie together there, how you yourself grew up watching movies in that hall. What you don’t mention is that one fine day you had stopped visiting this cinema hall — choosing to go to the multiplex instead — and that is why it is closing down.
