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Libraries: What I Miss Most When At Home in India
I grew up in the Nagpur of the 70s and 80s. It was a wonderfully laid back city then, unaware and unconcerned that everything happened to it a heartbeat later than to cities like Pune and Mumbai. New books, movies and plays reached us a few weeks later, and English movies often passed us by. So much so that we even got TV only in 1982. There were only two bookshops, one for English books and one for Marathi, and then there was an old, yellowing building with an empty parking lot. The rusted arch on the gate bore the chipped letters: ‘Panchasheel Library’. My parents collected books passionately, creating for themselves an impressive private library. We grew up in a huge house, surrounded by old and new, dusty and shiny books on myriad of subjects. The only outside library I used then was a small hole in the wall down the street, after developing a guilty yet defiant interest in Harlequin romances. My grandmother got Marathi books from a quaint little library run by a group of women who, as it turned out, also loved to cook. Their place had three rooms: a kitchen where they created delicious treats for festivals, a library room, and an office from where they sold the goodies and lent out books. The library room had five rows of shelves on which book-sets were arranged. Each book-set had ten books, piled on top of a thick cardboard and tied together with a pair of shoelaces. The list of books was written on the back of each cardboard, and one could choose a set accordingly. I loved the idea, the books, the women, and their food. When I turned eighteen, I went to a college in Pune. I was given leave to spend Rs. 50 a month on books. On the first trip to a bookshop as an independent young adult, I came face to face with a book of photographs, ‘Legends: Clark Gable’. That was the end of a year’s worth of my book-allowance, and also the beginning of my search for a library. Pune is a city of colleges and has a history of learning. There are some very old libraries, and some very specialized ones. I searched for one that would suit me: a modern library with a wide variety of undamaged books, old and new, and a librarian who could and would help. A place that invited me to return, relax and spend a few of hours with its treasures. The British Council Library fit some of these criteria, but none of the others did. Many educated Indians of my generation pride themselves as being book lovers. We buy, borrow and devour books, even the cheap, pirated copies. There are footpaths filled with books from ‘I am OK, you are OK’ to ‘Complete works of William Shakespeare’. True, we love books. But do we care for them? Do we care for their preservation, their restoration, their availability and their accessibility? I lived in Sweden for a while. On my first weekend there, walking down the street, homesick and chilled to the bone on a dark December day, I noticed the ‘City Library’. I stepped inside just to get away from the cold. There was a glass box next to the front desk. Inside was a leather-bound book with gilded edges, cut breadth-wise into narrow, perfect segments. The book was fitted with an electronic mechanism that moved the segments sequentially to resemble a gently moving worm. A ‘bookworm’! The lady at the front desk guided me first to the coffee-room and then to a reading room, where I found a copy of ‘The Hindu’! It was a week old, but it was from home. The lady got me to fill out a form and in a jiffy I was a proud member of “Lund City Library”. The city libraries in Europe and the US are free to any person with a name and an address. There is no limit to how many books, cassettes, DVDs, CDs you can borrow. What they don’t have, they order for you through their extensive network. If you don’t want to borrow anything, but just want to read, write or browse, you can do it without a membership. These libraries work on trust. It is assumed that you are mature enough not to misuse the services provided. We often hear of libraries that were, the lost libraries, like the one in ancient Alexandria. Humans have always had a need to collect and store information. It’s an ode to our accomplishments and our imagination. At some point, libraries began to store knowledge and literary works, and not just records of official dealings. Together with lists of servants’ wages in the palace and prices of food in the royal pantry, the libraries started preserving letters, musings and fiction. Baked brick tablets with word-collections, lists of magical spells and herbs were found in the library of the king Ashurbanipal of Nineve in the 7th century BC (today’s Iraq). In one of the cuneiform tablets, the king boasts of his own greatness by proudly stating that he could read and write. Today, many of these tablets are safe in another great library, that of the British Museum. The library of Stanford University has a huge collection of letters of various American diplomats and writers across the centuries. Older ones are painstakingly restored and protected from the elements. Writings of Herman Melville and Louisa May Alcott are displayed in glass boxes at the first library in the United States, in Boston. Parents are seen urging their children to stop running and to take a look at the first page from ‘Moby Dick’. In San Mateo, California, there is a ‘green library’. It took ten years to collect money and to finalize their floor plan. 80% of their 30+ million dollars cost came from donations from the community! A group of women started the original library in the 19th century to give the community an access to information and knowledge. Today, it’s a four storied ‘green’ building, with windows placed in a way to reduce the need for artificial lighting and terraces in a way to allow breeze, making heating and cooling unnecessary. There is a floor with meeting rooms and areas dedicated to biotechnology, a floor for audio-visual medium alone, and one just for kids. This is the only place I went to before leaving California, with specific goal to take leave and pay my respects. When I lamented that I won’t get to come back again, the librarian kindly told me that I could use their e-books and audio-books from anywhere in the world if I had access to the internet. It is hard to express what a gift a good library can be. A world is opened up for you to touch, to use, and for no charge. Your addiction is taken care of here and encouraged, all based purely on trust. I missed it badly, the one thing I missed when I went back to India: a place to go to be with yourself or to be with friends. A place to research, contemplate, but also to read romances, and sip coffee. Imagine a rainy Sunday with kids to entertain. You take them to the library. They play; use a computer or read, while you browse through the Sci-Fi and fantasy sections. They admire the handwriting of Shivaji or a manuscript by Tagore, and you pore over issues of Nature or Scientific American. When the ‘story hour’ starts, you head off to ask the librarian about that book by that author everybody seems to have forgotten about, or systematically go through the section of Hindi movie DVDs for some obscure movie from the 30s. At the end of the day, you walk away with your arms full of enough material for a month, and happily spent children. Won’t you want such Sundays in your life? Shouldn’t everyone have a place like that to grow old with?
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