Hyderabad: Check the bestsellers in Amazon’s books section and you will find that for the last week or so, it is a book, that too a Spoken English guide, written by a graduate from Warangal’s Narayanagiri village that is competing for the top slot with much publicised works by biggies like Sadhguru and Priyanka Chopra.
Meet Vashista Bhargava, a name quite popular among English students in the State. On February 7, Bhargava released his book ‘Spoken English Course – 45 Days Challenge’, which is now swinging from Number One to Two, Three and back on Amazon’s Bestsellers List, competing with the likes of Sadhguru’s ‘Karma’ and Chopra’s ‘Unfinished: A Memoir’.
“I am overwhelmed to see my book in the top three. I brought out this book exclusively for Telugu people who want to speak English fluently without the fear of grammar and hence every sentence is written both in English and Telugu,” says Bhargava, who has already sold 10,000 copies online and offline. The demand is still high, with Bhargava now placing the printing order for the next 10,000.
Though a graduate, Bhargava does not have a doctorate in English, but his training in communication and soft skills has seen him teaching 20,000 people in just two years, apart from imparting skill training in multinational companies. He has also taught, economy, history, current affairs, science and technology, sociology and even anthropology in different institutions.
Once a civil services aspirant, Bhargava had launched his YouTube channel Vashista 360 in May 2019. With the Internet spreading its reach in rural areas, the channel has been quite popular among underprivileged rural people who are not able to afford expensive coaching to be able to speak fluent English. Within one month, he clocked one lakh subscribers, and now has over 6 lakh subscribers.
He has about 200 videos, with most of them having over 50,000 to two lakh views. His pages on Facebook, ‘Way of Learning’ and ‘Vashista 360’, too are quite popular. All this, he has made possible with a smartphone costing just Rs.9,000. And he is not stopping.
“There are many who prepared for the civil services but are still jobless. I will recruit all of them and have them take classes in subjects that they have expertise, make them my partners and make education available to all,” Bhargava says.
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