Bengaluru rain damages iconic Church Street bookstore, readers rally to help

Heavy rain that battered Bengaluru on Wednesday has left The Bookworm, an iconic bookstore on Church Street, grappling with significant losses after water entered its premises and damaged thousands of books.

In a post on Instagram, The Bookworm shared pictures showing its flooded interiors, with several books lying soaked on the floor.

“Due to heavy rain in Bangalore, we lost 4,000 to 5,000 books,” the store said in its post, highlighting the scale of the damage.

The incident comes amid unprecedented rainfall in Bengaluru, which has broken its all-time April 24-hour rainfall record. The city recorded 111 mm of rain by 8:30 am on April 30, surpassing the previous high of 108.6 mm set on April 19, 2001.

As visuals of the damaged bookstore circulated online, members of the reading community came forward with messages of support and suggestions to help the store recover. Many users proposed buying the soiled books as a way to offset losses.

“Reading community - if you buy one of the soiled books and bring another friend to buy another, not only will they recover from their loss, everyone who buys and reads them will also turn a little wiser,” one comment read.

Others suggested creative ways to help, including organising a “wet book fair” or using their social media reach to amplify support. “If any of the damaged books are still readable, I would be willing to buy as many as possible,” another user wrote, while several others offered to donate books.

The rain, triggered by a strong pre-monsoon thunderstorm, brought parts of Bengaluru to a standstill. Heavy showers accompanied by hail were reported across central areas, with ice pellets piling up on roads in localities such as MG Road, Trinity Circle and near the Mahatma Gandhi Road Metro station.

The extreme weather also turned deadly with seven people, including a child, losing their lives after a hospital wall collapsed amid the downpour.