Flood fallout: 3 lakh books damaged in Srinagar bookshop

Decades-old bookshop in Srinagar suffers massive loss of more than 350,000 books during last month’s devastating flood

ISLAMABAD:

A decades-old bookshop in Srinagar has suffered a massive loss of more than 350,000 books during the last month’s devastating flood.

Last month, the floods not only damaged healthcare and other infrastructure in the Kashmir Valley but also turned millions of books in the city’s bookstores into muck, KMS reported.



“Approximately 350,000 books got damaged in our bookshop,” said Zahoor Ahmad, the manager of a famous bookstore, Ali Muhammad & Sons, established in 1932. Ahmad said that the loss of books would be in millions of rupees.

“We had all kinds of books, academic, professional/ technical and our own publications. But everything was lost in the floods,” he added.

Students from across Kashmir would fetch from this bookstore the books and related academic material they needed. But now, it has signs of destruction to show. “Majority of the students would come to this bookshop because of its historical background,” Zahoor Ahmad said.

“We are trying hard to restore the bookshop to its glory. Right now, we are extracting dead stock from the store,” he added. According to the manager, besides academic texts, rare heritage books were also damaged.

“We would publish a heritage series which was rarest of rare. It was also damaged,” he said. Rarest among the series, he said, was Tarikh-i-Hassan, a significant historical account of Kashmir by famous author Ghulam Hasan Khuihami. “There were many other important series of books. Nothing is safe. Everything is gone,” Ahmad said.

He added, “We are in a process to revive it back. We will reprint the important books we have lost.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2014.