Chennai Pongal Book Fair 2016

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”.

There were sizable crowd in the auditorium outside hearing speech and shows happening on stage.