This was my first time at Delhi’s
World Book Fair, until I was quickly bombarded with memories in hall number 12,
from when I was six or seven years old, of being pushed into the Scholastic
book stall, coaxed into sampling the many educational toys and multimedia that would test
my applied mental maths, science and grammar skills, complementing my good
Indian education, preparing my kid-brain for standardised (and computerised)
test-taking in the (far) future.
Today, a different excitement preceded
me. When I heard about colleges giving free iPads to Indian students, my heart
skipped ten beats – was this my India? People throbbed between stalls and aisles
where screen space and page space became interchangeable; BPOs had also become
book happy. Good commerce was the high point for many Indian publishers today,
the unicorn of world publishing, having forever thrived on their volume and
velocity of books in numerous languages from over 5000 years of documented and
undocumented wealth from skinny pamphlets to doorstopper tomes. Books as cheap
as Rs. 15 were displayed on exhibitor shelves and promoted alongside live authors
holding out glass ashtrays (and fishbowls) for donations. Self-publishing brokers
enticed you to ‘become a (published) poet in 25 days,’ and booklove was
competing for shelf space with bookbiz. With a sizeable cross-section of people
of different ages and sections of society, the footfalls were the roughest
survey of what indicated a clearly buoyant industry. Local language publishers
(and we have about 22 formal and over 400 spoken languages in India) were all obtaining
niche markets in retailers and libraries abroad, setting up new imprints,
breaking new inroads. Digital was just another dimension of Indian publishing
and beckoned no print apocalypse, even as publishers the world over racked all
their brains, whipped up new technologies to struggle to co-exist in a tablet
eat tabloid world.
The running theme ‘Indigenous
voices’ offered a sound platform for the showcase of local and legacy art including Bihar’s historic Madhubani paintings depicting gods and
goddesses sketched by artists who mixed their colours from plants, bark, and cow
dung. The artists said their art could not be muted by a stink, even if “sab
devi-devta gobar hain” (all the gods are dung). Our economic choices are our
social choices too.
But the special debut this year
was the ‘author’s corner’: cool hotspots in every hall were dedicated to author
interviews and interaction. The organizer proudly told me it came from NBT’s generosity
and commitment to authors so that they do not have to be crammed in publishers’
quarters, stalling instead of aiding commerce. The idea was great, equally inspired
by other world book fairs and intended to accommodate healthy, telegenic audiences.
My first event at the author’s corner
would be for the critically acclaimed book Our
Moon Has Blood Clots and its author Rahul Pandita. No sooner had I arrived at
the venue than I was greeted with the sight of a gentleman in white robes and flowy
hair, bloodshot vermilion with rice grains shooting out of his forehead, as he
reclined into the studio sofa. “Ladies and gentleman forks” he began, “I am
Hindu Pandit, you can ask me anything you want to know about Hinduism, Hindu
ethics and Hindu morality.” A trickle of followers wormed their way into his
audience hold, and began asking him questions about how to be a good Hindu.
His
advice went on unabated for ten minutes until I caught the attention of an NBT guest
in-charge who hurried over when I signalled to her that this was not the
author! Her jaw dropped; she had asked the wrong man if he was Rahul Pandita and
he had replied, yes, seizing the stage too promptly. For proof, when I
reproduced the author’s photo from the insides of his first book, the girl paled,
but shot quick orders for cameras to stop rolling. The speaking man onstage caught
wind, and with the force of an ablution dropped the curtain, “Thank you forks.”
A trickle of audience members almost as easily dispersed with him, leaving one
with doubts about their ‘genuineness’ too… were they his followers pretending
to be an ‘audience’!
In between speedy intercoms the boss
organiser who had visited the publisher stalls meanwhile, returned to us with no
news, declaring the event cancelled. “Bah! These English language authors are
all like that…”, he cackled. “Big foreign publishers are also like that…” he
continued, “Gulzar ji, Akhtar sahib, and even I would never do such a thing!”
On that fated Saturday, when other
anticipated authors made their absence felt too, Mr. Akash Bannerjee, author
of India Shining and Sinking and
former TV TODAY broadcast journalist took on the vacant slots, capturing the minds
of an army of media students and budding journalists as he waxed on about the day’s news
from Afzal Guru’s hanging that morning, to the highs and lows of Indian
journalism today, provoking intense debate about idealism and commercial sense
in newsmaking. Book? Author? Who?
Even the absence of few heavyweight
authors on a Saturday did not quite dent the spirits of the masses who had come
to this Kumbh mela in books with hopes in hell to sever from their loved ones and
siblings, even as a handful of men roamed the grounds claiming to be speakers, jockeying
for minutes of fame on the NBT film archives. The National Book Trust staff utilized twenty minutes of cancelled event time that day, capturing my own
video bytes for their film documentary, sending me home in a woolly sheep's clothing.
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