Glitches continue to rule Kolkata Book Fair

Tridib Chatterjee, general secretary of Publishers and Booksellers Guild, says the best is yet to come.

“During the last few days there is usually an explosion of visitors and book sales,” he says. Although he does not provide a statistical breakup of this year’s sales and footfall, he estimates it is higher than in 2009, when about 14 lakh people visited the fair and sales figures reached 17 crore, “Overall, stalls are reporting at least 15 percent increase in sales,” Chatterjee adds.

The Mexico pavilion is a major attraction this year. Dibyajyoti Mukhopadhyay, secretary of the Indo-Hispanic Society, has been working on the theme country project since November last year. He believes 2010’s theme pavilion is the best so far. Besides having 3,500 books, it features Mexican chefs, performances by the Mexcaltitan Ballet dance troupe and discussions with Hispanic authors.

While most of the books in the pavilion are only for display, three are for sale — a collection of 50 poems by Octavio Paz translated in Bengali, an English version of a collection by seven Hispanic authors who attended the fair and a book on Mexican legends in English.

Mukhopadhyay said the presence of high profile Mexican officials like Laura Emilia Pacheco as well as authors and cultural performers made the theme pavilion quite successful.

However, book fair enthusiasts like Soma Banerjee from Behala found the pavilion confusing to navigate. She struggled to understand the subjects of the Spanish books—and there’s no help-kit available. Banerjee wanted to learn about Mexican cuisine, but little information was available and there were no Mexican food stalls either. She also complained of stench from a nearby restroom that filled the pavilion enclosure.

But stinking toilets are just one of the complaints at this year’s book fair. Dust is another. Many visitors were forced to cover their faces with handkerchiefs to beat the dust.

However, the guild officials hope to resolve these issues by 2011 and make the Milan Mela fairground more visitor-friendly.

Future plans include the construction of a flyover; an underpass to help people cross busy streets and give better access to entry points and ticket counters; more bus services to and from various points in the city and the suburbs; more shuttle services with combined tickets for the bus ride and entry to the fair; better managed entry lines for those with passes or tickets purchased in advance and finally, more restrooms and drinking water facilities.

“We were told the flyover will take three more years to complete but we hope to get the underpass executed by next year,” Tridib Chatterjee said.  “The situation with toilets is better this year compared to last year, but still far from satisfactory,” he added.

Despite the inconveniences, the roughly 609840 sq. ft. Milan Mela fairground is popular with young people and their numbers have increased this year, Chatterjee claimed.


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