ENDPAPER
Reading rooms
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
LATELY, I have been mourning the lack of public libraries in our country. The State and city central libraries we once had have long fallen into disrepair — books unreturned, stolen or vandalised. Who is to blame, really? Were we indifferent, ungrateful readers who didn't care what happened to these libraries? Or were the staff lazy and negligent?
A symbol of democracy
I somehow think the answer is the former. Even if the bureaucrats who ran these libraries were not book lovers or passionate librarians, why did we just stand aside and watch these great libraries shrink? Instead, we turned to the consulate libraries (British and American, mainly) and private circulating libraries to keep us in books. Can anything be done to revive them? I don't even know (and I don't know if anybody knows) if there is any State or Central funding for public libraries. If there isn't, shouldn't there be some? Isn't the public library an important symbol of a working democracy?
I have been particularly mourning the loss of our public libraries ever since I was privileged to spend a few months patronising one of those fabled New York public libraries. These libraries are free for the public and stock nearly every book that matters on every imaginable subject. You can borrow 25 books, five videos and six magazines at a time. And the knowledgeable, friendly staff act as though you are doing them a favour by patronising the library!
Friends of the library
In a small American university town called Ithaca (famous for being the home of ivy league Cornell University), I encountered an amazing group of people called Friends of the Library. These are book-loving men, women and children from the community who volunteer their time, energy and ideas to enrich public libraries, starting with their own local library. To benefit the library, this group holds a mammoth book sale twice a year (spring and fall) for the public. The third largest of its kind in the country, with over 300,000 books, videos and records (which are collected over a period of six months) sold inexpensively so that people can buy tons of books without having to pay the prices bookshops ask. Two hundred and fifty volunteers work more than 14,000 hours each year to make the sale successful. Volunteers sort the items into 60 categories, which are then subdivided or alphabetised within category. And the magic of the whole thing, I discovered, is that this large collection comes exclusively from books donated by the community! So the sale is only as good as the donations.
I was deeply moved by the community's response to the event. The sale began on a Saturday morning at eight a.m., and I planned to be there by seven to beat the crowd. When I got there at seven promptly, I found, to my astonishment, more than 600 people before me in a line that was snaking away two streets further from the doors of the sale building. I learnt later that people had begun lining up outside the doors on Friday afternoon! Many locals — some from across the country — had spent the night before camping outside the building, sleeping bags in tow. Some of these book fiends were probably used and rare book dealers but a majority of them were simply plain book lovers who didn't mind waiting 16 hours in line. The proceeds from the sale benefit libraries, which in turn benefits the community. Couldn't we replicate something like that here?
Irreplaceable experience
In a brilliant, scintillating new book called The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidyanathan (a rising young academic star who teaches at New York University) which looks at "how the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system", you learn that the library is the biggest threat to commercial information systems and content industries because libraries are leaks in the information economy. "The perfect library", writes Vaidyanathan, "would offer you access to any text, song, film, image, or video game. It would be easy, convenient and free. The perfect library would be built and stocked by volunteers who donated their time, labour, creativity and passion." The Internet, I suspect, has made several Indian school and college kids not miss the public library too much. But the experience of being in a public library is irreplaceable. The hushed reading rooms that feel cool even on a hot day, the murmuring quiet broken only by occasional whispering, and browsers lost in dark book stacks. Can we, as a community of book lovers across the country, raise consciousness about the importance of public libraries and restore them to the great places of learning and entertainment they once were?
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
