Every night, Anke Gowda chose books over rest. 🔴🔵🟤🟢🟠🟣🟡 Once a bus conductor, later a timekeeper at the Pandavapur Cooperative Sugar Factory, Gowda spent nearly 30 years working while quietly building a dream. After long days as a bus conductor, he’d search for what others had left behind—old textbooks, torn novels, discarded dictionaries. Over decades, that quiet habit grew into Pustak Mane—the world’s largest free-access library with 2M+ books in 20 languages, rare manuscripts, documents from the Mysore dynasty, and newspapers dating back to the 1800s. No entry fee. No ID cards. No questions asked. Just shelves of knowledge, open to anyone who walks in—students, researchers, writers, civil service aspirants, even judges. “Books are my breath. It is my duty to preserve them for the next generation,” Gowda says. Nearly 80% of his salary, his retirement pension of ₹40–45 lakh, and even his house and plots in Mysuru—all of it went into building the library. Today, at 75, he doesn’t just run the library—he lives inside it with his wife. Because for him, books were never a hobby. They were a responsibility. This Republic Day, India honoured him with the Padma Shri. Impact doesn’t always begin with a big idea. Sometimes, it begins with loving one small thing deeply and choosing it, every single day. #PadmaShri #RepublicDay #Karnataka [Republic Day, Padma Shri, Anke Gowda] 🔴🔵🟤🟢🟠🟣🟡 #പത്മശ്രീ പുരസ്‌കാരം #ആങ്കേ ഗൗഡ😍😍 #🇮🇳 ഹാപ്പി റിപ്പബ്ലിക് ഡേ🇮🇳