Handmade in India: In book stores before Diwali 2008

Handmade in India: In book stores before Diwali 2008

M P Ranjan

Image: The book release function at Rajiv Gandhi Handicrafts Bhavan on the 21st July 2008. Shri Shankersinh Vaghela, Union Minister for Textiles, Government of India with Sanjay Agarwal, Development Commissioner of Handicrafts (extereme left) and Dr Darlie O Koshy (extreme right) at the book launch function.

I met Bipin Shah of Mapin Publishers at the farewell lunch for Dr Darlie O Koshy that was hosted by the Chairman NID ‘s Governing Council, Mr Salman Hyder on 23rd October 2008 at the Fortune Landmark Hotel in Ahmedabad. He gave me the good news that the book was received very well at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair with an order for 5000 more copies which I presume will be the second print run for the book which had still not hit the stands in India. He was not able to give me any indication of when the first print of 5000 copies would be available to the public since the Development Commissioner of Handictrafts had yet to take a decision on the marketing MOU with Mapin and the first print run that was completed in August 2007 was still lying in godowns in Delhi and in Ahmedabad.

I do not know what happened overnight, since suddenly and out of the blue, the owner of the Art Book Centre in Ahmedabad, Mr N A Patel, arrived dramatically at NID on 24th October 2008 afternoon with 100 copies for sale to faculty and students of the Institute, finally breaking the silence in which the books were lying over the past one year and three months after its printing in Singapore. I hope to hear from both Mapin Publishers as well as from the Development Commissioner of Handictafts on the further availability of the book across bookstores in India, which I hope is quite soon. I tried to check out the Mapin Publishers website but it was a shame that none of the links worked and I hope that they fix that soon. I will report again on this blog when more information comes my way but I am quite relieved to see that at least some copies have found their way to the market after such a long wait. Perhaps NID should offer to carry stocks of the book in our publications department just as we had done for the Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India when the book was not available in any book store in India when it first was released in 1986.

Do look out for the book in a bookstore near you and let me know if you find them on display in your favorite store! This should be a good Diwali after all the carnage on Dalal Street these past few weeks as the Sub-Prime financial panic spreads from the Wall Street to the emerging markets and this is significant since our book is intended to help our living crafts in India and the crafts community here to negotiate this tumultuous change through globalization and pave a way forward for our craftsmen to build a live and vibrant creative economy on the foundation of accessible information which can be our future if we set our mind and policy to realize what is possible with the use of Design in India. The second and third volumes that are still in production as well as the proposed web based initiative to follow all hold the promise of making the Hand crafts of India an accessible resource for the production of goods and services across the world through a creative reinterpretation that would be made possible by direct access to information and people in the days ahead.

The previous posts on the Handmade in India are listed below:

FRIDAY, 25 JULY, 2008
Handmade in India: The team and the mission

SATURDAY, 19 JULY, 2008
Handmade in India: Book Launch in New Delhi

TUESDAY, 22 APRIL, 2008
Design inside Education: Let us start early, for our schools in India

WEDNESDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 2007
WebInnovation2007: Web 2.0 Conference at Bangalore

TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST, 2007
Handmade in India: A Handbook of the Crafts of India arrives from the publisher

Download the complete book here as a pdf file 337 mb size Handmade in India as pdf 337 mb size

M P Ranjan