BOIMELA

(profpghosh.com)

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The number of books I have filled my almirah within the past ten years is much more than the number of books I accumulated in the previous 40 years. I am talking about the books that are not part of my bread and butter. Though I procured them, I must admit that I could not do justice to all of them, particularly Rabindra Rachanavali.

Kolkata is a city of book lovers. There are far more poets in Kolkata than in the whole of India. Kolkata has College Street. College Street has a Coffee House. College Street is the biggest second-hand book market in the world. Geoffrey Moorehouse made an interesting observation about College Street: “You can poke around many of these shops and find one genuine and purely pleasurable old edition after another, and the booksellers will be well content with your company and your chatter about books long after he has realized this time, he is not going to make a sale. He and his fellows are perhaps the only tradesmen in town who will leave you alone if that’s how you prefer to be. They are part of a climate as inseparable from Calcutta as the monsoon.” College Street has changed but not so much that you can’t recognize it. Many think College Street needs to move with time. I don’t believe ?College Street needs an image makeover. As they say, beautiful people don’t need makeup and extended beauty doesn’t make a beautiful more beautiful.?

Kolkata has Boi Mela. It is one of the largest attended book fairs in the world. The soul of the book fair is struggling writers, artists, booksellers, and publishers. A blog so poignantly portrays the association of ordinary people with the book fair.

“My abiding memory of Book Fair would be this man we met a long time ago. My father and I were sitting on the grass. Poverty writ large on his face and his faded, threadbare shirt, he came and started reciting a poem. And then asked my father whether he would like to buy a poem for 10 paisa. (His punch line was ‘a poem for 10 paisa’). My father asked him what he did for a living. Smiling shyly, the man said that he was a poet. He lives far away in a remote village in North Bengal and all through the year he goes to different fairs all over West Bengal—mostly village ‘melas’ where he recites and sells his leaflets. He also proudly pointed out that every few months he comes up with new material. My father bought one of his leaflets and after he had gone read a few of them. They were of middling quality—a jewel in the dust this man surely was not. But therein lay the beauty of it. The beauty of conviction. The beauty of dreams. The fact that this man believes that one day he will make it as a poet. And what’s inspiring is that despite the odds he faces every day, he still manages to radiate enthusiasm for his craft—a luminant joi de vivre that comes from believing in what he does. Looking at him going about his work, I realized that not once during his numerous sales pitches does his enthusiasm or self-belief waver, nor does he ever sell his poverty and ask for sympathy—not when insulted, not when rebuffed, and not when sleeping on the footpath on a cold Calcutta night. That, my friend, is the mark of a true artist. And the Book Fair is where you find him.”

In Kolkata homes, if you don’t find a sofa set you shouldn’t be surprised. You shouldn’t also be surprised if you find a bookshelf filled with ‘Rachanabalis’ as solitary furniture in the drawing room.

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