‘He may have been a bookseller, but what he spread more was knowledge’
A tribute to Anil Arora, owner of Bookworm, who passed away on Tuesday.
There are some bookshops you go to only to
make a transaction. You spend a few minutes, pick up the book you want, ask how
much, pay up and you are out of there, already in another place in your head.
And some are from joy. Bookworm was my joyful
spot. The small shop on one of the radial roads which joins the middle and the
outer circles was a necessary pit stop for more years than I can remember. I
couldn’t go to CP aka Connaught Place (all this Rajiv Chowk nonsense is for the
post-metro, post-internet generation) without haring off to Bookworm and
spending many pleasurable hours in there. Because of the place itself, bright,
airy, the two levels joined by a spiral staircase that led you to heaven.
And because of its owner Anil Arora, who
became, what I call, a “bookfriend”, who very quickly learnt your name and your
choices, and started keeping aside those books he thought might interest you,
for the next time you came.
It wasn’t as if there weren’t other bookshops
in CP — there was the New Book Shop, there was Galgotia & Sons, there was
also that second-hand corner right next to Plaza theatre. Then, there were the
bookshops in Khan Market and Jor Bagh, which so many people I knew swore by.
Not me.
Some other bookshops did manage to snaffle
some of my time. I began frequenting the first outpost of Midland on Janpath; I
also started visiting Fact and Fiction in Vasant Vihar. But my unswerving
loyalty remained with Anil and his Bookworm, which was suffused with Anil’s
sharp intelligence and warmth and lilting jazz melodies. Funny thing, Anil may
have been a seller of books, but what he spread was knowledge about many
things, particularly jazz. Whenever you walked in, there would be a jazz legend
playing. You could groove along while you browsed.
I discovered the delights of excellent
writing on cinema in Bookworm. Anil had some great stuff you couldn’t get
anywhere else. And I used to nudge him all the time to stock the sort of
specialised crime and science fiction I was a huge fan of, handing out my next
wish list. He would make sure to reach out to his distributors to get the exact
thing I wanted. So many times I didn’t have the money, not right then, and he
placed the book in my bag and smiled. He knew, and I knew, that I wasn’t going
anywhere, no siree.
When the metro construction began unloading
rubble right at his doorstep, I could see that his once-bustling shop was on
its way out, like so many of the original dwellers in CP. The last time I had
gone in there, our conversation had touched upon closing the space. What are
you going to do with all these books, I’d asked. And he’d said, please come
home and take as many as you like.
He passed away two days back. So many friends
who shared a love for Bookworm and the man who ran it called and messaged. One
common thread ran through them all — Anil, the lover of jazz and the purveyor
of all kinds of exciting volumes, gave us bookworms a place to call our own,
never mind if we were early birds or not.
** All my posts are dedicated to Sir Dr. S R Ranganathan
on occasion of his 125th Birth Anniversary
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Events | BOSLA-NIFT
ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES-2016 on Saturday, 20th August 2016 at 10.00 hrs in National Institute of Fashion
Technology, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai.
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