Duo brings mobile library to the city

In the digital age when brickand-mortar bookstores are up against e-commerce and distracting gadgets, Walking BookFairs (WBF) was started in 2014 as an initiative to take books to small towns and villages and schoolchildren who had never been exposed to them. It was in the small town of Semiliguda in Koraput district of Odisha that Akshaya Rautaray, who was working with a national book chain, and Satabdi Mishra, a media professional, decided to quit their careers to promote the habit of reading. “We wanted the common man to look at, hold, read, and also be able to buy, a book. 

We started taking books in backpacks to nearby villages and small towns in Odisha and displayed them on the footpath and other public spaces where people could look at the books without feeling intimidated. We were pleasantly surprised to see that several people were drawn towards our stall, especially children who came in large numbers who said they were seeing story books for the first time.” 

Later in 2014, the two of them bought a second- hand Maruti van and travelled across Odisha, taking books to people in 30 districts of the state. 

In December 2015, as part of their ‘Read More India’ tour, they set out on a similar tour across the country, but with a newer, bigger truck equipped with customised bookshelves and about 4,000 new English novels. This has involved covering 10,000 km across 20 states of India spread over a period of 90 days. 

They were in Chennai recently (Elliots Beach) and Madurai (Victoria Edward Hall premises) recently, as part of the campaign. “We found fried chicken stalls, tattoo shops, weekend Zumba and martial arts classes — and not a single book store. But the response we got was warm,” Akshaya says. 

The duo also added that they were surprised that in a city like Chennai, known for its literature and art, the reading habit is diminishing among the current generation. “There are so many places in India which do not have bookshops or libraries and people have no access to good books. 

And there is a very small percentage in India that reads books. We, as a society, focus more on getting marks, degrees, jobs and less on real learning, which can happen only through reading. Reading fiction encourages independent thinking and fuels the imagination while reading only textbooks does just the opposite,” they say. 

Noted authors, like Jerry Pinto, Jash Sen, Kishalay Bhattacharjee, Ravinder Singh and Ruskin Bond, who also visited the store, have praised their effort. The WBF truck serves as a free library and a bookshop where all books are available at a 20 per cent discount. 

Three major publishers are supporting this tour with books, namely, Harper Collins India, Pan MacMillan India and Parragon Books India. “It is a costly tour and we are bearing all the other expenses,” says Satabdi. 

Read More India, which started out on December 15, 2015 from Bhubaneswar, has now reached Uttarakhand, the 16th state on the itinerary, and will end on March 15, 2016. So what keeps them going? “The joy on the faces of children when they are with books,” say the two impassioned bibliophiles.