Ekushey and its book fair

The Ekushey BooK Fair, which had a modest beginning under private initiative immediately after Bangladesh's independence, has meanwhile turned into a big national event organised every year in February. Why the month is important even a child of this country knows. But the observance of the Language Martyrs' Day on the 21st day of this month would have turned into a mere ritual had Chittaranjan Saha, the owner of a publishing house named Muktodhara, not taken the initiative to set up a book stall on the Bangla Academy premises on the 21st of February in 1972. Notably, that was the first Sahid Dibash (Language Martyrs Day) observed immediately after the country's independence. Men, women and children who after laying floral wreaths at the base of the Central Shaheed Minar (the national monument dedicated to the Language Martyrs) on the morning of the Shahid Dibash would usually return home and attend cultural functions in the evenings found another avenue to express their love for their mother tongue, Bengali, for which the language warriors laid down their lives, through buying and reading books. Indeed, it was a befitting way to commemorate and pay respect to the language heroes. And the sapling that the said publisher planted 51 years ago has over the years grown, as though, into a giant Banyan tree. In fact, the Ekushey Book Fair is a unique event centring the Shahid Dibash that can still inspire the old, the youth and the children of the urban Bengali middle class to maintain as well as develop the healthy habit of buying books and reading just for pleasure. Admittedly, the Ekushey Book Fair has been playing a significant role in this regard. In truth, Banglees of this part of the world cannot be said to be great lovers of book nowadays. But they were not so, especially before the advent of the digital era. In those days, at every district and even sub-divisional towns, there were public libraries where local bookworms could read books as well as borrow for reading at home. The service was free for those who would be enrolled as members of those public libraries. And those who are now in their sixties and seventies might recall how popular were the works of Sarat Chatterjee, Bankim Chatterjee, Mir Musharraf Hussain and other famous novelists of that era among their mothers and grandmothers even if they lived in remote villages. And that was possible because of public libraries of those times. But thanks to the internet and the digital revolution, every kind of reading material, let alone books, is just a click away from us. But still what is lacking is the appetite for reading those books. Unfortunately, modern-day readers do not seem to have enough time than those of the pre-internet era. Small wonder that most young people of today consider it a tedious job to waste time reading books such as classics, especially if they are in print and voluminous in size. Amid these not-so-reassuring developments, the Ekeshey Book Fair in Bangladesh has kept alive the culture of visiting book stalls at the fair, touch and smell freshly printed books and buy one or two.
According to Bangla Academy, about six million people visited this Ekushey's book fair and saw a record sale of books worth Tk.600 million.
Let every Ekushey book fair keep the nation's love for its language and thirst for reading books alive.

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