Akshara's New Store and the Yudhvir Award

I haven’t really noticed it until now but most of the posts I write here have topics that seem to be linked somehow. Today’s post is another such one. It is about a favorite bookshop of mine and an award to someone who is almost a permanent fixture at most of the book readings that take place in that book shop. I am talking about the Akshara book store and Shankar Melkote.

Shankar Melkote Gets Yudhvir Award
It was in the news that this year’s recipient of the Yudhvir Foundation Award is Shankar Melkote, the ever smiling and genial man behind the Little Theater group. Shankar Melkote gets the award for his contribution to ‘popularizing the written word through dramatization of texts.’ He rightly deserves the award for his zeal in participating in book readings since more than a decade.

I’ve seen him conduct the readings that are mostly held either at one of the Askhara book stores or organised by Askhara Book Store at big hotels. He is unfailingly present at all book readings held in Hyderabad, be it that of a big writer or a twenty something poet. He brings alive the readings by taking over from the start to the end of the readings in his inimitable manner with a mix of some fine Hyderabadi humor and erudition. One doesn’t get bored at book readings where Shankar Melkote is present, and he is present in all book readings like I said earlier.

Akshara Book Store, Srinagar Colony Shifts to a New Place
The day after I read about the Yudhvir Award to Shankar Melkote I saw an ad by Akshara Book Store about its eleventh anniversary and its new premises at Road No. 3, Banjara Hills. What the ad did not say was that the store has shifted from Srinagar Colony to the new place.

Anyway, with nearly four stores Akshara is easily the biggest chain of bookstores in Hyderabad. I love visiting their stores where you are free to browse without uniformed sales persons hovering behind you as you go around looking at the titles unlike the other stores.

I read in the small ad that they have a new branch at Gagan Mahal and I have to check out this as well as the new store at Banjara Hills soon. The store at Gagan Mahal is nearer to my office and I can drop in during the lunch time or on my way home. They have a wide collection of books and magazines in all their stores but their stationery collection leaves a lot to be desired.

It is at the Akshara Book Stores that most of the book readings in Hyderabad are held and Lakshmi, the person behind Akshara always lends support to all the writers in her usual smiling way. Right from the year Akshara has set foot in Hyderabad, there have been dozens of book readings most of which I have managed to attend.

In a future post I will write about all the book readings at Akshara that I have been to.