Stanford is one place Anand loves to visit whenever, he gets opportunity. May be, he has a wish unfulfilled to be its students, or may it is because of his love for the bookstore in the university campus open to all that is the best that I have seen in my lifetime.

We had visited Stanford University campus twice or thrice during our visit to US in 2005 too. Aditya, the grandson of YP Singh, the only friend in Salt Lake was studying there. He did wonderfully well in CAT and got admission. However, we saw the university only from outside. Anand did not know much about the place. Anand came to know about the bookstore after Shannon came in his life. She has taken some course in the university.

It was a pleasure to go around the store after visiting the wonderful cathedral. I could then understand why this university is one of the best in the world. Why can’t India’s premier institutions such as IITs, and IIMs have bookstore of this standard that each of the great institutes such as Stanford, MIT, UC (Berkley), or Harvard are having in its campuses in US? Some private entrepreneurs such as Apeejay group that owns Oxford Book Store in Kolkata, will certainly be interested in setting up similar stores, if it is given certain incentives and space in the institutions’ premises in India.
Note: While a search for images on Google with ‘Bookstore Stanford University’ indicated 162,000 entries, the search for ‘Bookstore IIT Kharagpur’ had 3,930entries all mainly about IIT. You can yourself experience this.

I am sure that all the directors of the IITs and other institutes of excellence in India would have visited these American universities. However, I am not sure if they would have found time to go around the bookstores. Let me confirm that the bookstore will hardly require any drain on the institutes’ own resources. Will the HRD ministry create roadblock to prove its authority over the institutes if the directors invite some private entrepreneurs to do that?

Yamuna got a Stanford T-shirt from Shannon.