Wordsmith chaiwala from New Delhi

Laxman Rao aka Laxmanrao Shirbhate, who has authored 30 books, at his tea stall near ITO, Delhi

Another chaiwala story is making the rounds in New Delhi. Laxman Rao, who sells tea on a pavement of Vishnu Digambar Marg, ITO, says he has got what he had aspired for in 46 years of an eventful journey that started from a small village in Maharashtra. He has been accepted not just as an excellent tea maker, but also as an extraordinary author and publisher, whose works need to be showcased to the world that he couldn't have an access to. His real name is Laxmanrao Shirbhate, but he chose the pen name Laxman Rao.

He came to Delhi as a jobless 10th pass youth in 1975 with the sole objective of getting his Hindi novel ‘Ramdas' published. The publishers he approached showed him the door, hurling insults at the die-hard Gulshan Nanda fan. "It ignited a fire within me," he told me from Delhi. Over the years, Laxman Rao authored 30 books on a variety of subjects and published them himself from his pavement spot where he sits selling the chai and displays his body of work, neatly arranged on the footpath tiles.

When a friend told me about Laxman Rao's feat, I called the author on Sunday morning. The chat turned out to be a sunshine story that should be shared. The 68-year-old feels content after all the struggle because he has been hired as a tea consultant by a five-star hotel in New Delhi which also exhibits and sells his work. "The hotel management sent me a representative last year after some seniors read about me in the foreign press. I couldn't join them because of the pandemic, but once unlocked, I took up the assignment last month." Why is this development so important for him? Laxman Rao says he didn't need the money because he still earns enough and his sons are doing very well financially. "I get paid handsomely. I get a five-star breakfast. But the respect I get there is priceless. Top people interact with me and appreciate my work. They buy my books," says the tea maker, who prepares his breakfast highlight concoction for the five-star between 6.30 and 11.30 am before leaving for his ITO stall to be its sole operator. His evenings are spent on the pavement with friends and admirers. He returns to a rented accommodation near Nirman House where he stays with wife Rekha and sons Hitesh, an insurance agent who helps the father in publishing jobs, and Paresh, an officer with a nationalised bank.

Laxman Rao worked at a weaving mill in Amravati before it shut in 1975. He tried his hand at farming in his village Talegaon Dashasar, but his love for writing Hindi novels took him to Delhi via Bhopal where he worked a couple of months as a daily wager to earn Rs 90 for to buy a railway ticket to the capital where the pocket book publishers were in abundance. Rebukes after rebukes from the publishers made him lie low and concentrate on earning his daily bread. He set up a paan-beedi shop near ITO but met with resistance from the municipal authority which finally gave him a street vendor's licence. He soon realised that instead of running after rude publishers, he should invest his own earnings to publish his work. That's how Bharatiya Sahitya Kala Prakashan came into being on an ITO pavement. In 1978, his first book ‘Nayi Duniya Nayi Kahani' hit the ITO pavement. However, his love story project, ‘Ramdas' came in print much later in 1992. He says the late Indira Gandhi, the then PM, gave him an audience after her associates told her about him. "Inspired by Indiraji, I wrote a play ‘Pradhan Mantri," he adds, saying that some of his works have been presented in theatrical form at Delhi's prestigious Shriram Centre for Performing Arts.

But why would a villager without any literary background or formal education, write in Hindi instead of his mother tongue? Laxman Rao explains that the Hindi cinema and Gulshan Nanda, whose novels were converted into film scripts, impacted him deeply. "I used to watch a lot of Hindi movies and was in awe of the dialogues the big stars spoke. I used to ask myself why can't I write and speak such lines?" he says, and reveals how he improved his Hindi by studying shabdkosh (vocabulary). In Delhi, he enrolled in a distance education programme to pass the 12th CBSE exam, BA from Delhi University and MA (Hindi Literature) from Indira Gandhi National Open University.

But whenever a book came out, reaching out to the readers was a difficult task for this pavement publisher. In the quest of readership he had cycled in the capital and around visiting about 1,000 schools for marketing his books. "I had the physical strength then. The reading culture has taken a back seat now, but there are ways of reviving it and one is to take your stuff to the readers," he suggests to the people of his ilk who want to create something out of nothing. "Literature never dies. Isn't Shakespeare still alive?" he asks. People who understand the immense inspiration Laxman Rao generates invite him as a motivational speaker. "I have been to many places. My audience cries, laughs, and I'm happy that they return home with something substantial after listening to a small person like me," signs off Laxman Rao, before telling me that he hasn't yet acted on a suggestion of using social media to motivate more and more. Let's hope he does it soon.

Dharmendra Jore is political editor, mid-day. He tweets @dharmendrajore
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