An idea which never took off

It is so good to see Dibakar Banerjee making a Byomkesh Bakshi film, I hope it will inspire people outside Bengal to read these very well-written stories of a fictional Bengali detective. This reminds me that Byomkesh was not the only one of his kind. Bengalis started writing detective fiction in the 1890s, around the same time as Arthur Conan Doyle. I found a nicely-written chronicle of Bengali detective fiction on the net a while ago. Which brings me to the topic of this post -- the under-representation of Bengali books outside Bengal, and specially on the internet. One of Bengal's mammoth achievements is a huge number of books written since the mid 19th century -- from all genres. Today the only way you get a proper glimpse of this is when you stroll through College Street in Kolkata. No, your favorite ecommerce stores don't have most of the books you'll see there. This is the only way, and I couldn't believe it at first in today's age of internet. I was looking for a out-of-print book on music history and I had to go down to the publisher's office in College Street to know about it (note: I don't live anywhere near Kolkata). The tragedy is that the book probably won't be reprinted. Actually that's not the tragedy -- the real tragedy is that those guys have never thought of selling such stuff as ebooks. They never realised what treasures they were throwing away which could be very valuable to people around the globe. In the age of internet and limitless online storage this is a crime.

After such experiences I thought of launching an online catalogue of Bengali books, specifically for smaller publishers -- so that they don't become extinct. To get started I tried to get a few catalogues from the publishers in College Street. I called them up and couldn't get any. I admit I didn't try hard, but I lost my enthusiasm when one publisher lazily remarked that there's no need for any catalogue -- I could just come down to the shop and see what they print! I felt sad that these people are still living in the age when a person will call only from Kolkata -- they have no idea that their best customer might be living in a different continent. So this is how my idea couldn't take off. I will be very happy if anyone implements it. However I don't have much hope, seeing the absolute lack of vision in Bengali publishers.