Every mother’s son has been to Hobby Centre,’ says owner Rishi Kumar with a mixture of exasperation and amusement. I had turned up at six in the evening without an appointment, and demanded to be given a guided tour of India’s Hobby Centre, the legendary toyshop at the intersection of Kolkata’s Park and Russell Streets.
We are sitting in Big Max, the restaurant which is also part of the toyshop. I remember coming there with a date some two decades ago, during my university days. But try as I do, I cannot remember whether I came to the toyshop as a child. Everything seems familiar though, the walls with posters advertising Firpo’s and the bakery in Great Eastern Hotel, as well as the displays of stamps, coins, currency notes and first-day covers. But the conversation-stopper is the row of vintage toy cars, placed on a high ledge near the ceiling overlooking the eating area. Most of them are over half a century old and big enough for a medium-sized child. They gleam red and green in the dim light of the restaurant, like ghosts of a Christmas past.
Meanwhile, Mr Kumar has been telling me about the history of the toyshop. Founded in 1954 by his father Suresh Kumar, the toyshop originally had a clothes section called Kiddie Corner, which morphed into an ice-cream parlour in 1981. Prior to the 1970s, the toyshop would import hobby sets from British companies such as Hornby and Meccano; it also had its own toy factory off Foreshore Road in Howrah, employing over two dozen people. Most of the toys manufactured there were of the battery-operated and motorised kind.
(In an article in The Kathmandu Post, Jug Suraiya remembers shaking hands with a Japanese robot at the Hobby Centre, at the age of seven.) During the golden age of the Hobby Centre, it opened five more branches, one each in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Then came the bad old days of import restrictions and the inspector raj, both hitting the toyshop hard. Many Indian toyshops went out of business in the 1970s as foreign toys almost disappeared from the market. Hobby Centre carried on gamely, though its branches outside Kolkata closed down one by one.
The 1980s saw the opening of an ice-cream parlour and a restaurant inside the toyshop premises (an incredible 10,000 sq. ft. including the mezzanine floor). Both generated sufficient revenue for the toyshop to continue running. As cheap Chinese toys flooded the market, other toyshops on Park Street (remember Paragon?) began to down their shutters. The toy market spread to Gariahat and even to the suburbs—nowadays it is not unusual to see cheap electronic toys sold from a street-side heap or by hawkers in local trains. A small but loyal clientele continued to frequent 1-A Russell Street, to buy toys and have their model airplanes serviced. For the community of aeromodellers in Kolkata, Hobby Centre was—and continues to be—the one-stop-shop, for everything from buying spare parts to repairing a broken wing to acquiring a brand-new craft.
As we walk out of the restaurant and enter the long, narrow toyshop area, I see rows and rows of planes suspended over my head, while others are undergoing repairs on the counter. Pictures on large boxes advertise such models as Lockheed, Concorde, Mosquito, Spitfire and so on. Mr Kumar hands me a price list. The cheapest are the construction kits priced at Rs 40-80. These are followed by the ready-to-fly models which retail for Rs 125-175. Then there are the chuck glider and the catapult glider kits, followed by the two-line glider and free flight models. By the time you have turned over the page, you are into serious aero-modelling territory. Radio-controlled sets start at Rs 1,600 and go up to Rs 3,000. The prices won’t exactly break your bank and I wonder why there aren’t more enthusiasts at the Behala Air Show held in the first week of December every year. Beginning sometime in the late 1970s, the event ran for 15 years before disappearing for almost a decade. It returned in 2002 with 25-odd competitors, and a special demonstration given by the Hobby Centre’s men and their flying machines.
The aero-modelling section is succeeded by the philately section. It is manned by Gopal Singh, whose father once occupied the same post. I am given a crash course in old coins and currency notes, and their current market value. By now, however, my eyes have been drawn to a gleaming vintage car that stands at the far end of the shop. This, I figure, is one of the 38 vintage micro-cars that Mr Kumar owns. The car in question is a 1935 Rytecraft ‘Scootacar’, the smallest vintage car in the world, and a regular participant in the Kolkata vintage car rally. The other cars—pedal-driven BMWs, Rolls, Daimlers, Vauxhalls—are kept in an adjacent room amidst a veritable treasure trove of mechanical curiosities. There is a pedal aeroplane from Jaisalmer, a pram, and towering over them all, like an exhibit from a J.G. Ballard novel, the derelict remains of a Taylorcraft Auster, a two-seat WWII lightplane.
Led by Mr Kumar, I duck and weave my way into a warren of workshops, bristling with a bewildering array of machinery and ironmongery. Mr Kumar points to a 1918 Douglas motorbike engine which was used to power small planes. A fan stamped with the General Electrics logo lies next to the lathe machine which manufactures spare parts for model aircraft as well as for Mr Kumar’s amazing collection of model cars.
Most of these are undergoing makeovers, and I am assured that they will soon be in working condition. ‘I don’t want this place to change,’ Mr Kumar tells me as we walk down the spiral staircase back into the shop. Neither do I, I whisper fervently as I walk out into rush-hour Park Street.