अणुरेणियां थोकडा तुका आकाशाएवढा Anuraniyathokadha Tukaaakasha-evadha Too scarce to occupy an atom Tuka is as vast as the sky Navayan...
अणुरेणियां थोकडा
तुका आकाशाएवढाAnuraniyathokadha
Tukaaakasha-evadhaToo scarce to occupy an atom
Tuka is as vast as the sky
Navayana breathes somewhere between the atom and the sky. We are a publishing house that has never been about business as usual, but about embracing the unusual. We have been around for seventeen years, and I’d like to tell you the how and why.
Founded on 5 November 2003 between Pondicherry and Chennai, where Ravikumar and I respectively lived, we launched with four slim titles of 40 to 80 pages priced between Rs 40 and Rs 60 at the Landmark bookstore in Spencer Plaza (the mother of malls in India). I had invited the writers Narendra Jadhav (whose memoir Outcaste had been just published by Penguin), P Sivakami, Kanimozhi (not involved with politics and scandals back then) and N Ram of The Hindu (getting him meant you were assured coverage in his paper). Mini Krishnan of OUP, who contributed Rs 10,000 as seed money for Navayana, received the first four titles from Jadhav.
Hemu Ramaiah, founder of the Landmark chain of stores, who had known me then as the Outlook correspondent, asked me: “How many chairs? 40?” I said we may need over a hundred. She smiled all-knowingly. “Last week we had a bestselling author of a maternity and pregnancy...
