[Reader-list] Happy Sunday :) Library and Garbage bins

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

  Dear all,

On the happy-sad subject of libraries (because their presence makes  
me happy and their absence makes me sad), here is a little something  
i wrote a few years ago for the literary page of the Hindu newspaper  
at the invitation of Ranjit Hoskote. You can see the contributions  
made by other invitees by following the link below.

Its nothing much, but I thought I would share it since the subject of  
libraries has come up.

best,

Shuddha
-----------------
Call for a readers' uprising
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2006/09/03/stories/ 
2006090300030100.htm


I owe more or less the origins of everything I have cared to know to  
the hours spent as an awkwardly solitary child and teenager in the  
womb of a few libraries in Delhi. The Delhi Transport Corporation's  
40 paise tickets would take me on long bus rides every week to the  
lost libraries of Nalanda and Alexandria, as I hopped from one Delhi  
library to another, running away from the purgatories of school and  
the playground, reliving the history of the written word through hot  
summer afternoons. In my childhood, my guardian saints were bus  
conductors and librarians. One took me to the other. My world,  
composed almost entirely of books, lay in their special custody.

`Bookish' was almost an expletive when I was growing up, an  
expression usually marked by a snarl, at best by the condescending  
sneer of inverted snobbery and muscular athleticism. It is therefore  
with some pleasure that I now witness the return of the book and of  
reading, of `bookishness' even, into public life. There is even a  
perverse pleasure to be had in knowing that the non-reading  
chattering class has to endure the fact of a `reading' in order to  
access the social smarm of a book launch.

But elsewhere, away from page three, a quiet revolution is under way.  
Each day a new independent publisher seems to be announcing an  
imprint. Cafes open book corners to ensure that customers stay for  
more than one cup of coffee. The `reader' is a demanding, gregarious,  
desirous creature and she is to be found everywhere. On the Delhi  
metro with a book between stops, on the streets, aided and abetted by  
the honourable book pirate and the second-hand book seller, sharing  
what she reads by handing out nicely bound xerox copies of expensive  
books to friends. Reading and writing circles proliferate online and  
in physical spaces. Meanwhile publishers and intellectual property  
sharks hike the prices of books, libraries deteriorate, conspiring to  
quell the readers' silent uprising.

There is an urgent need for a greater public space that can  
accommodate the expanding culture of reading. Most importantly, what  
this means is libraries, millions of more libraries. It is a crying  
shame that no major city in India has a hospitable public library  
system, with an accessible, well-funded, capacious public library.  
Delhi has the Delhi Public Library (which is no longer very public,  
and hardly a library) hidden away and overshadowed by the Old Delhi  
Railway Station, where books are kept in a kind of charming old-world  
purdah, as far away from readers as possible. Budgets for the  
acquisition of new books are next to non-existent, and the books  
themselves languish, uncared for, in various stages of decay in  
darkened corners of a cramped space. The satellite libraries of the  
Delhi Public Library system in different neighbourhoods of the city  
have died unmourned deaths, or are in a terminal state.

What is doubly unfortunate is that the tradition of private  
collections forming the nucleus of public libraries, which resulted  
in the treasure houses that are the Rampur Raza Library, the Khuda  
Baksh Library in Patna, the Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur or  
the David Sassooon Library in Mumbai seems to have gone completely un- 
emulated. I am not aware of any significant act of philanthropy in  
the decades following independence that has resulted in the formation  
of a viable contemporary public library building effort anywhere in  
India. The nation has failed its readers. Now it is the turn of  
readers to form their own mobile republic of libraries with a  
shareable, photocopiable, downloadable, easy-to-pirate constitution.
On 10-May-09, at 5:13 PM, anupam chakravartty wrote:

> Here's a little library's story.
>
> http://www.soundofdrowning.com/lib.html
>
> regards anupam
>
>
>

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net