Pune is better than Chandigarh in another way

I went shopping yesterday and found myself in a bookstore. My eyes
were drawn to a bunch of books including the latest Malcolm Gladwell
and the sequel to Freakonomics. I was going to purchase both of them
but they were a little too expensive at those prices. Immediately I
thought back to my time in Pune, about how I almost never bought any
new books from the stores. As soon as a book hit the store, a pirated
copy of that would show up on the streets.

Now here's what is impressive in retrospect. The books that were
pirated weren't just the most popular and "easy reading" stuff like
you get everywhere - your John Grishams, DaVinci Code, etc. You'd get
the slightly offbeat books as well. And not just that, the vendors
were usually aware of the worth of most of these books and basically
you couldn't hope to "score a good deal" from them. (It always threw
me off to watch these guys, wearing these shabby clothes, talking
about how this particular Malcolm Gladwell book isn't as good as his
previous one. It's entirely possible that he's just repeating what he
heard from another customer, but still, very impressive.) More
importantly, what this means is that the customers these stores got
were well-read people who asked for (and got) the rarer books pirated.
(At this point I'd like to ask that we just leave out the entire
discussion on ethics and legality of pirating books for now.) It's
very impressive when you think about how the supply/demand forces
manifest themselves here and give you an insight into the population
of the city.

Of course in Chandigarh, outside of a bookstore, I'll be lucky to get
a conversation with anyone about any book. I'll even settle for a
discussion about why Chetan Bhagat sucks. Any takers?