Until a few days ago India's largest Crossword store was located on ITI Road in Pune's Aundh. A three-storey building dedicated to books and books and only books! From Jeffrey Archer to Ruskin Bond and Durjoy Dutta to Twinkle Khanna, all the popular international and national authors would come to the store to launch their books. Bibliophiles would line up in large numbers to catch a glimpse of their favourite authors and get a signed copy of their books. However, this wouldn't be the case anymore as this place has been shut down.
An X (formerly Twitter) user took to the microblogging site and shared a video of a person taking down the Crossword sign from the store. In a long post, he shared how much the place meant to him and his daughter.
He wrote, "The first word my daughter learned to speak was ‘book’. With wide eyes, she would point at a book and say ‘boo’ in a voice full of glee. We began taking her to a nearby Crossword bookshop (in Aundh, Pune) when she could barely walk. Our trips soon became a cherished daddy-daughter tradition, where we would visit once every month and buy three books for her. She chose two and I chose one. A friendly employee once told me, his face beaming with pride, that this was the biggest Crossword in India! Three floors full of books felt like heaven. But then they converted one floor into a kids' play area. Another surrendered to a toy shop. Then cafes. Then stationery. Then an event space. The bookshelves, once brimming with finely curated collections, became crowded with cheap campus romance and badly written historical fiction. Yet, we continued our tradition. 3 books a month!"
He added, "Yesterday, we went there to find the doors shut. A man on a ladder was ripping out the Crossword sign. Slowly. Methodically. As he pulled out one letter after another, I felt a physical sensation of pain. My daughter had tears in her eyes. A glowing light somewhere was snuffed out, and the world became slightly darker. And some of my faith in humanity died forever! A society that does not read is a society that does not know itself. We used to turn pages and paint stories with our imagination. Now we endlessly stab screens till our thumbs hurt, our minds numbed by the dopamine drip of likes and reels. We have become slaves to our devices, consuming whatever they decide for us, our thoughts hijacked by algorithms, our souls starved for meaning."
"If you want your children to read, don’t tell them. Show them. Children hate listening to adults, but they love imitating them. Pick up a book yourself, and they will do the same! P.S.: I verified the claim. The largest store of India’s most beloved chain of bookshops has indeed shut down," he further said.
Meanwhile, netizens said the shutting down of the store was "unfortunate".
"I know this store. It was a landmark. While I also know the brand is being revived by new owners (Pune-based, interestingly), economics and changing (declining) reading habits are forcing a relook at real estate costs. So long as the stores exist, we should rejoice. Big or small shouldn’t matter. But I feel your pain of losing a cherished place," said a user.
Another user commented, "So true...will truly miss the Aundh crossword, used to spend hours there on weekends!"
"I used to visit this place every weekend. Enjoying the colours of the illustrations in the books and interesting stationaries. It's been 7 years since I shifted out of Aundh, but I still can feel the pain while watching the name crossword getting stripped," a third user wrote.
Check out the reactions below:
