Meet Tuticorin’s Hairdresser-Librarian Pon Mariappan

A friendly Tamil hairdresser in Tuticorin caught Prime Minister Modi’s attention after he became a local hero for people who are his regular customers. Meet 39-year-old P Pon Mariappan, who runs a library in his salon. Yes, you read that right, he offers his customers waiting for a shave or a cut, to ponder over their favorite book.

And he has a good collection too, in his salon he has a collection of nearly 1500 books waiting to be read. What makes it even more special is his passion to inculcate reading habits among others.

Mariappan offers 30 percent discount to the customers who reads. He started offering discounts in his salon from last November which made him the talk of the town. Unbeknownst to him, his good deed brought him on the Prime Minister’s radar. The public broadcaster later invited him to speak on a radio program which to his surprise was PM’s ‘Mann ki baat’ where he talked about how poverty forced him to drop out of school. Despite this, after he opened his salon in 2014 in Millerpuram, Tuticorin, where he opened a library to continue reading and encourage others to do so as well.

Out of his large collection, he has about 850 books on politics and culture by popular authors. He says he wants to promote reading and learning among children. He adds that his favorite remains Thirukkural, a classic Tamil language text consisting of 1,330 short couplets of seven words each, or Kurals.