Bookseller Nalini Chettur founded Giggles – a one-hundred-square-foot stall on the edge of a hotel in Chennai (formerly Madras) – in 1974 with an investment of 1,000 rupees (then about $130). She and her store are now “a pillar of Chennai’s English-language literary scene,” visited by everyone from Satyajit Ray to Jan Morris to visit Israeli dance scholars.