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.