Crossword Bookstores ran a cosplay and trivia contest at Inorbit Mall in Malad, giving Mumbai's anime and manga readers a floor of their own for an afternoon.
Crossword Bookstores gave Mumbai's anime and manga readers a floor of their own this week, running a cosplay and trivia contest at Inorbit Mall in Malad for an audience that mostly meets online.
The format was simple and it worked. Cosplayers came as the characters they read, walked for the room and answered for their choices. A trivia round then separated the people who watch from the people who know, which in a fandom this deep is a real distinction and a quick way to find the room's experts.
Pratham Chouhan took first place, Nitesh second and Rahul Dutta third, chosen by Abhijeet Kini of Kini Studios and Anadi Abhilash of Chitragaatha Comics, two judges who make comics rather than cover them.
Darshan Chajeed and Janhavi Swamy put it together for Crossword, with the Mumbai Anime Club, the Indian Comics Association and Inorbit Mall behind it.
The venue is the part worth noting. Anime and manga fandom in India has grown up largely on streaming and social media, with conventions once or twice a year as the only time it takes physical shape. A bookshop inside a mall is neither of those, and it is open every day of the week. Readers who would never buy a convention ticket walked past this one and stopped.
That matters commercially as well. Manga has become one of the most reliably selling categories on Indian bookshop shelves, and the people buying it are exactly the crowd that turned up in costume. An afternoon like this costs a retailer very little and tells it plenty about who its customers are.
None of which needs grand claims about community building. A few hundred people spent a Sunday among others who recognised their characters, three of them went home with something, and the shop that hosted it now knows the audience is there. In a scene still short of regular meeting places, that is the useful kind of event.
