The Chennai book fair by Bapasi that happens around New Year/Pongal festival has been a must go annual event for me. This year due to the heavy rains and flood in November & December, many book publishers’ godowns got flooded, damaging several crores worth of books, rendering the stocks unsaleable. As a result the organiser (Bapasi) has decided to postpone the Book Fair 2016 to a later date, may be around Tamil New Years day in April ’16.
Though not as grand in scale, there was a smaller book fair called “Chennai Pongal Book festival” was organised by another association at YMCA Grounds in Royapettah from 13th January to 26th January 2016. Today I visited the festival, I saw only few stalls by known publishers, lot many stalls were by resellers featuring discount books, nevertheless the venue was packed with readers going through each stall. I bought few books including காலச்சுவடு பதிப்பகத்தின் சுந்தர ராமசாமி எழுதிய “அக்கரைச் சமையல்”.
Chennai Pongal Book Fair 2016
There were sizable crowd in the auditorium outside hearing speech and shows happening on stage.
சென்னை பொங்கல் புத்தகத் திருவிழா 2016 – டாக்டர் ஏ. பி. ஜே. அப்துல்கலாம் அரங்கம்