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With the birth of the talkies, the voice of Noormohammad8212;better known as 8216;Golibar8217; fell silent. He soon found it though by launching Chakram, a humour weekly. Chakram in Gujarati means a clown. The Golibar tag stuck to him and became a brand that was to become popular with the generation that followed him. 8216;8216;You will not find any Gujarati in any corner of the world who doesn8217;t know of Chakram and Golibar,8217;8217; claim its publishers.

Mohammad Yunus, the present editor and son of its founder, who prefers to use the initials H.N. Golibar, says when one of the professors in a journalism course in Mumbai told him how advertisements were indispensable for any publication8217;s survival, he decided to challenge it. 8216;8216;I decided to take the challenge. Returning to Ahmedabad in 1976, the first thing I did was discontinue all advertisements and I went ahead totally with the reading material, cover to cover,8217;8217; says Yunus, who took over in 1971 when he was just 19.

8216;8216;At that time we were getting ad revenue of about Rs 6 lakh against the cost of Rs 80,000 and a circulation of 63,000 copies. But my father always told me to swim against the tide, this advice helped me keep my moral up and we never looked back,8217;8217; he says.

But how do they manage to stay afloat? The work culture in the organisation, he says, plays a major role in cutting cost. 8216;8216;Our philosophy is simple: we have no white elephants and believe a penny saved is a penny earned. Even today when we have a circulation of 74,000, our printing wastage is just 100 copies,8217;8217; he says.

8216;8216;Second, we not only minimise on costs by saving on overheads, we make purchase of material like ink and paper well in advance and in bulk8230;at any given time we have stocks of three years8230;like my father, I have not allowed my sons to wallow in luxury but brought them up the hard way,8217;8217; says the second generation publisher.

THE main reason for the weekly8217;s survival is its loyal readership among the Gujarati diaspora. The secret of the immense popularity of Chakram now Chakram-Chandan lies in its humour and presentation of current issues in a lighter vein.

Another aspect is the content peculiar to this publication, that is crime, thrillers in serialised form all penned by Golibar himself. Before him, his father would don the writer8217;s cap. Golibar junior has written 137 such novels under five pseudonyms. Of these, 28 have been published and translated into languages as diverse as Marathi, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Sindhi, Malayalam and Hindi.

With an MA in English literature, Golibar picks up ideas from his surroundings. 8216;8216;I don8217;t write for critics but for my readers and they are happy,8217;8217; he says.

Golibar, who is affectionately called Bholabhai by friends, has, however, got a string of other awards during his career, the most recent being an Outstanding Achievement Award 2005 from the World Memon Foundation in March. Others include a best novel writer award from the Gujarat Sahitya Sangam in 2000 and best Gujarati journalist awards from the chief ministers of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in 1995 and 1996.