The Soap Queen in a Bookshop

It’s rare for a TV star these days to lay claim to finishing five plus books a month. Especially if you happen to be working in a daily soap. But Poonam Joshi, who currently ups the vamp quotient in Sahara One’s Woh Rehne Waali Mehlon Ki is an exception. She admits of being an avid reader, “It doesn’t take much effort to read a few pages before going to bed or even between shots.” Naturally, she volunteers to be a help in her favourite neighbourhood bookshop, the Booklovers in Lokhandwala, Mumbai.

Keen at having a go at every job in a bookshop help’s daily routine, she joins late morning right after the opening of the shop. Joshi diligently takes the manager’s instructions, who appears to be relatively easy on his star help. “We generally ask our new recruits to just observe the workings for the first two-three days,” he says, “So you are free to do whatever you want.” Joshi, however, gets going right away, joining the other store helps in sorting and putting the scattered books into their respective sections.

She starts with one of her favourite sections, fiction, and promptly notices some cinema books from the opposite rack stuffed into the film pile. “Rearranging books which casual readers just pick and leave anywhere back in their respective sections is one of the first jobs in a book shop. This is done before the crowd troops in.”

“Bookshops have been a great relaxant for me, but today when I got to work in one I realised the amount of effort that goes into the working of even a small bookshop. All of us who profess to read a lot should meet one of these guys who tackle readers queries here, and they will realise how limited our knowledge is vis-à-vis them.

It’s amazing how they are so updated on titles across genres and authors,” says Joshi.

—Piyush Roy

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