Penguin's Cold Shock

Penguin Books recently came up with a series of books on Fiction Collection and Non-Fiction Collection to commemorate their 20 years in India.

I was in Landmark, Lokandwala last week and was amazed to see those books stacked in a very stylish manner. I could see three volumes on Non-Fiction Collection and two volumes on Fiction Collection there. All the books were huge in size and both me and my sister were tempted to have a close look at them. We picked one and started to check the index. We stopped at 'Chowringhee'. Though I have not read it, but I know very well that this is a celebrated novel by Shankar and also that it's huge in length. But in this book Chowringhee was fitted in three pages only! We both started to look at each other's face. How can it be possible?

Then we started to check for any novel in the index that I've already read. And found 'The Great Indian Novel' by Shashi Tharoor. It too had three pages alloted to its fate. I opened the page and was bewildered to find that they just picked one chapter from the novel and published it; not even the summary of the novel!

Honestly speaking, we were standing dumbstruck holding those huge books in hands, each one of which costs 250/- to 350/-. I fail to understand what made the publishers to come out with such a weird idea? Who on earth would buy these books just to read one chapter of some famous/infamous novel? Why would anyone read them? The entire concept appeared utter meaningless to me.