The Bookshop I Remember

A visit to Gorakhpur railway station took me back to an old bookshop from my college days. The shop was gone, replaced by a tea and snacks counter. What followed was a reflection on reading, the bookshops that shaped my habit, and why we started Read to Lead Change.

The bookshop I remembered was gone. In its place was a tea and snacks counter — a small reminder of how our reading habits have changed.

After almost a year, I was back at Gorakhpur railway station.

I was waiting for my train on Platform No. 5. I left my luggage there and walked towards Platform No. 1.

There used to be an old bookstall there.

I don't remember exactly how old it was, but it was old enough to have been a part of my college days.

I knew the station had changed. A lot had changed. New facilities, new shops, new designs, more modernisation.

But I never expected that the bookstall would disappear.

Or perhaps I never expected to miss it until I stood there.

The shop was gone.

In its place was a tea and snacks counter.

I looked at it for a while because, somehow, I was still sure this was the same place.

So I asked the middle-aged shopkeeper,

"Chacha, yahan ek kitab ki dukaan hua karti thi?"

He looked at me and said,

"Woh hamari hi shop thi."

Then he paused.

"Lekin aap jaise readers ne aana band kar diya, isliye humein band karni padi. Aap jaise readers jis din se wapas aana shuru kar denge, hum dobara kitab bechna shuru kar denge."

He explained that running the bookshop had become difficult. They had no choice but to start selling tea and snacks.

For him, it was survival.

For me, it was something more.

I looked at the shelves.

The place where I remembered seeing Premchand was now occupied by biscuit packets.

Where Dostoevsky's books once stood, there were snacks.

The space where Paulo Coelho's books used to attract travellers was now being used for samosas.

Newspapers and magazines had made way for tea kettles.

Nothing dramatic had happened.

No shutter came down with a farewell.

The shop simply stopped selling enough books to survive.

And perhaps that is what made it more painful.

I couldn't blame the shopkeeper.

He was right.

My own reading journey did not begin with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

It began much earlier and in a rather ordinary way.

A significant part of my childhood was spent at my Nana's house.

I still remember being in Class 7 when I opened an old sandook and found some of my Nanaji's books and papers.

Among them were books that meant very little to me at that age.

Mother by Maxim Gorky.

Charitraheen by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.

Maila Aanchal by Phanishwar Nath Renu.

Godaan by Premchand.

I picked them up.

I tried reading a few pages.

And honestly, I found them boring.

Most of what I read went over my head.

I didn't understand the language, the situations or the emotions behind those stories.

But something had started.

A book had entered my hands.

And perhaps that was enough.

Then came Champak and Nandan.

Then Nagraj.

Then Chacha Chaudhary.

Then other magazines, comics and small books.

Slowly, reading stopped being something I was supposed to do.

It became something I wanted to do.

And once that happens, it becomes difficult to stop.

During my college days, that old bookstall at Gorakhpur railway station became a regular stop for me.

And it wasn't only Gorakhpur.

Whenever I was in Benaras, I would regularly look for bookshops and spend time browsing through books.

Sometimes I went looking for a particular title.

Many times I had no plan at all.

I would simply walk into a shop, look at the shelves, pick up a book, read a few pages and decide whether it should travel with me.

Delhi was another story.

There was something about the old bookshops and booksellers of Delhi that made you want to stop.

And whenever I got the opportunity, I would spend time in Old Delhi, where even today you can still find old booksellers and shops carrying books that have clearly lived a life before reaching your hands.

The atmosphere is different.

Books are not always neatly arranged.

Some are old.

Some have yellowed pages.

Some have handwritten names inside.

Some look like they have been waiting for years for the right reader.

And I like that.

Because a book does not have to look new to be valuable.

It just needs to have something worth saying.

The World Book Fair was another experience altogether.

Walking through rows and rows of books, publishers, authors, and readers is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't enjoy books.

You enter saying you will buy two books.

You leave wondering how you are going to carry twenty.

And even there, the best part was not always finding the book you came looking for.

It was discovering the book you didn't know you needed.

Whenever I travelled back home during my college days, visiting that Gorakhpur bookstall became almost a routine.

I would buy something for the journey.

Sometimes I knew exactly what I wanted.

Sometimes I would simply stand there, look at the covers and pick up something I had never heard of.

Then came the train.

I would find my seat, put the luggage away, open the book and start reading.

The journey somehow became shorter.

Later, whenever I travelled from Benaras or Delhi, the habit remained.

A book for the journey was almost as important as the ticket.

I don't think I consciously decided that books should become part of my travel.

It just happened.

And perhaps that is how many good habits begin.

Years later, I started buying books online.

It was convenient.

But there was another problem I kept facing.

Pirated books.

I simply cannot read a pirated book.

Even if it is a book I desperately want to read.

Give me an old book.

Give me a book with yellow pages.

Give me a book whose cover has faded and whose pages have travelled through three or four homes.

I don't mind.

But it should be original.

A book is not just paper.

Someone wrote it.

Someone published it.

Someone designed it.

Someone printed it.

And someone should be able to earn from it.

That is when I started thinking about what happens to books after we finish reading them.

A book bought once can sit on a shelf for years.

Or it can travel.

From one reader to another.

From one home to another.

From one generation to another.

And that thought eventually became one of the reasons behind our Read to Lead Change campaign.

We started collecting preloved books and giving them another chance to find readers.

The idea was simple:

Don't let a good book become a forgotten object. Let it travel again.

It sounds simple.

But it isn't.

Getting people to part with books is difficult.

Getting people to buy preloved books is also not always easy.

And somewhere along the way, I realised something else.

The problem is not that people don't love books.

Many people do.

The problem is that reading has to compete with everything else.

We are living in the age of reels and shorts.

A reel takes seconds.

A short video takes a minute.

A series can take seven hours.

But somehow we tell ourselves we don't have twenty minutes for a novel.

We can give seven hours to a web series but struggle to give seven days to a novel.

We say a short story is too long.

We call a ten-minute article "lengthy."

And yet we can spend an hour scrolling through videos that we won't remember tomorrow.

I am not saying this as someone who has always been a perfect reader.

I am not.

My reading has gone through phases too.

There have been months when I read a lot and months when I barely opened a book.

But I know what books have given me.

And I know what they can give to a young person.

From Premchand to Vinod Kumar Shukla.

From Sarat Chandra to Nirmal Verma.

From Mahadevi Varma to Harishankar Parsai.

From Gorky to Dostoevsky.

From Tolstoy to Gabriel García Márquez.

From Orwell to Kazuo Ishiguro.

From Godaan to Raag Darbari.

From Gunahon Ka Devta to Kasap.

From The Little Prince to The Kite Runner.

From comics to classics.

From railway bookstalls to Old Delhi booksellers.

From a forgotten sandook at my Nana's house to the World Book Fair.

Somewhere in between, books became part of my life.

Not because someone told me they were important.

Because I found them.

Books change.

Readers change.

The world changes.

But the need for stories doesn't.

We still need stories to understand people we have never met.

We need books to travel to places we may never visit.

We need characters who make us uncomfortable.

We need writers who challenge what we believe.

We need quiet pages in a world that is becoming increasingly loud.

Perhaps that is why seeing that old bookstall disappear affected me more than I expected.

Because it wasn't only a shop.

For many people, places like that were small gateways to another world.

You could walk into a railway station with ₹100 in your pocket and walk out with a completely different journey waiting inside your bag.

A book.

And then the train would arrive.

You would find your seat.

The landscape would begin moving outside the window.

And you would open the first page.

That was enough.

I don't know whether that shopkeeper will ever start selling books again.

But his words stayed with me.

"Aap jaise readers jis din se wapas aana shuru kar denge..."

Maybe he is right.

Maybe bookshops don't disappear because books have become less valuable.

Maybe they disappear because readers stop showing up.

And perhaps the answer is very simple.

Don't just say that reading is dying.

Go buy a book.

Buy one from the small bookshop.

Buy one from the bookseller in Old Delhi.

Buy one at the World Book Fair.

Buy an original copy.

Buy a preloved one if you can.

Read it.

Recommend it.

Give it to someone.

Pass it on.

Then pick up another.

Because a book lying unread on a shelf is still a book.

But a book moving from one reader to another is something else.

It is a conversation continuing.

A story refusing to end.

An idea finding another mind.

A memory finding another home.

And maybe that is what we are trying to do with Read to Lead Change.

Not simply move books from one home to another.

Move stories.

Ideas.

Questions.

Memories.

Possibilities.

From one reader to another.

The next time I am at Gorakhpur railway station, I hope I don't have to look at a tea kettle and remember the bookshop.

I hope I find the books again.

And perhaps, someday, that shopkeeper will look at a young traveller and say,

"Beta, kaunsi kitab chahiye?"

And the answer won't be,

"Koi bhi achhi si de dijiye."

It will be,

"Aap bataiye. Main kuch aisa padhna chahta hoon jo mujhe thoda badal de."

Maybe that's where reading begins again.

Not with a campaign.

Not with a lecture.

Not with a hashtag.

Just with one person walking into a bookshop.

Picking up one book.

Opening the first page.

And deciding to stay there for a while.

Because perhaps the real question is not whether books are disappearing.

The real question is whether we are still showing up for them.