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Deccan Herald » Open Sesame » Detailed Story
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For love of the printed word
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Mrittika Sen salutes T N Shanbag, who has revolutionised reading with the Strand Bookstall, a store where books never gather dust.
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Whether love or hurt is more powerful to motivate great work, is a debatable question. But what is undoubtedly true is that when hurt is the main cause to rekindle something that you’ve loved for long, it has a lot of power and a whole lot more punch.
I’ll take you back to the days when a Penguin paperback cost a rupee. You know, those black-backed, austere-looking ones. Mumbai was a small town where days were lazy and drawn-out. But even in those days, there were dreamers and those who did not quite understand their dreams. On a lazy afternoon in those times, a student walked into a big bookstore near the Victoria terminus in Mumbai with two rupees in his pocket. He was a bookworm for whom money was a constraint for things that he could afford, but not for things he could dream of. As he was browsing through the bookracks, ambling his way from one row to another, a guard came into the picture. He did not have time or patience for amblers. He curtly ordered the student to either buy something or leave. To the student, the meaning of a book did not lie in buying it. It lay in reading it. But he understood in that minute that selling books was no different a business for most people than selling everything else.
With tears in his eyes he made his way to an Iranian restaurant and had two cups of tea. He sat there for sometime, maybe because nobody shooed him away. Or maybe because an idea was brewing inside his head. An idea that had been dormant for a long time and had been awakened by the hurt he felt. At the end of the hour, T N Shanbag had decided to sell books from his own bookstore someday. That day and those harsh words changed his life and also the world of bookselling in India.
Armed with his dream and a lot of newfound enthusiasm, Shanbag realised that he knew nothing about books. He had only looked into them with a reader’s eyes till then and he did not even know where to source them from. But he toiled with his idea, spending afternoons reading under trees and in compounds. Then one day he walked into the Strand cinema hall to watch a movie and by the end of the show, he had found the space for his bookstall.
At a corner of the hall, Shanbag had a kiosk made, for which he paid Rs 450, well beyond his means at the time. He contacted Macmillan, Oxford and other publishers and collected some 300-odd titles. He set up shop, counting heavily on the viewers who would saunter into his kiosk during the interval of the movie they had come to watch. Shanbag adopted a tactic to sell the books he had assembled, a tactic only a passionate reader like him could come up with. He started finishing the titles one after another. He would read up a book while the movie was running and chat up the customer when he came calling. He soon realised that more or less everybody liked buying books from a man who knew his Dickens from his Laski. Word spread about the bookseller of Strand. Shanbag sold books to Pandit Nehru, T T Krishnamachari and his goodwill grew. Justice M C Chagla did not think twice before recommending this young man to a friend who arranged for a bigger space. The bookstall shifted from the premises of Strand, but Shanbag kept the name and the memories.
Today Strand Bookstall is perhaps better described as a phenomenon. Those of you who have strolled into Manipal Centre on Dickenson Road in Bangalore, could not have overlooked its glass windows that glisten more with the wisdom acquired over many decades rather than success. Strand’s success is a saga of love, faith and immense concern. Its racks and floors are stacked with books imported from the world over. You are on principle never shooed away if you happen to decide that the best place to wait for your friend or spend a lazy afternoon immersed in a book and a bottle of mineral water is a step on Strand Bookstall’s spiralling stairs. You can take your pick from Nat Geo’s photography series to books from the Britannica house. Strand stores coffeetable books on the Pharaohs and almost every single title of fiction that you or I or the local scholar has heard about. There are books on love, art, religion and almost every subject that humankind has developed in its history. And what’s more, you get a standard 20 per cent discount on any title that you buy, even the just-released ones, and some titles sell for a higher discount. Or if you like looking up on the net for what Blackwell or Walker is publishing in the UK or the US, just place an order and they’ll get it for you.
Apart from generations of readers, Shanbag has also been recognised by the government of India. He is the only bookseller in India who has been awarded the Padmashree for nothing else but selling books. The government felt that he was transforming an entire society with his work.
For Vidya Virkar, Shanbag’s daughter, who proudly carries forward the mantle from the Bangalore outlet, books are a way of life, they’re the foundation of a society. Strand glows in the warmth of this belief and over years both Shanbag in Bombay and Virkar in Bangalore have come to know most of their customers by face, and some by name. An array of scholars, playwrights, historians, critics and just about everybody come here to look up a title and to ask about another. Then they bring others who stay on. It’s not a place where you feel isolated as a reader. It’s more about reading and growing than about prices. Strand’s prices have held readers and big bookstore chains in awe. It has become a cultural landmark in these two cities. Along the way Shanbag has found more people like him. And he has converted the rest with his warmth and conviction. Maybe one of them was the guard from the big bookstore who had once driven him away.
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Friday, October 7, 2005
English
for you
