Libraries – Oases for the Thirsty Readers

[FONT=&quot]There’s one public building I consider as sacred as places of worship - A Library! I am referring to those great imposing edifices called Public Libraries comparable to ancient temples complete with pillared façades and cool dark interiors. If you can smell the divine fragrances of oil lamps, camphor and joss sticks in a temple, you can also get an equally heavenly aura and smell of old books inside a great library. Inside the temple, you find devotees standing in silence in front of the sanctum sanctorum, in private conversations with their omniscient gods. Enter a good library and you find aficionados of great men of letters silently worshipping the omnipotent words – words that created, rewrote or preserved history.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]If Public Libraries are comparable to great religious places of worship, there are those small circulating libraries comparable to the small wayside or ‘below the banyan tree’ deities – accessible to the common man as he hurries along the route of his life. Just like persons who quickly circumrotate the deity on his way to the office, we nip into these small, erratically stacked narrow rooms, place our petitions at the altar of the aged, dour, bespectacled gent or the surly and aloof portly lady and quickly return or pick books for the week. Boons and blessings are bestowed and granted in the form of the latest magazine or bestseller.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sadly, many a ‘local library’ or the ‘countrified ‘ Reading Rooms are in states of gross neglect. There are books, but they are in very bad and sad conditions. They are also less frequented. This may be due to sea change in people’s reading habits due to the interference of the visual media. It can also be because of the red tape involved in the running of libraries. There are far too many exercises to undergo before getting a book issued. The membership card has to be maintained, books’ details to be entered, fines to be collected after due dates and there are far too less copies of books to cater to the demand.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]My aunt K in the US is an avid reader. But, unlike me, she rarely buys books. She says all books are available in the local State Library and she can borrow about half a dozen books at a time. I can only sigh in envy at such luxury. My Mom used to endure an hour long bus ride to the Public Library in Trivandrum, where she was allowed 5 books which she had to return in a month. She also recounts with a mirthless laugh how she was denied membership in the University Library just because she is not graduate. She is probably more well read than the chief librarian. My mother speaks and writes beautiful English, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi. She understands Sanskrit and Kannada. She has been reading since she was 14 when she got married to my father, a bibliophile. But she is not a graduate as she had got married while she was in the first year of Pre University education. So pathetic are the results of tightened red tapes of bureaucracy. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]But then again, libraries have their own list of complaints, I believe. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The first and foremost is the funding. Inadequate allotment of grants for buying and updating the collection is the greatest malady of libraries. This is generally true of school libraries. I, once, accompanied our school librarian to the annual Sharjah Book Exhibition to get books for the school library. We had a measly Dhs.3000 to splurge and amass valuable tomes for the shelves. We felt so disconcerted when we met an ex-teacher of our school with the librarian of the school she was currently working in. They had an expense account of Dhs. 20,000. Needless to say, I was bitten by the green-eyed monster. My own school, privately owned, was more into show business whereas the other school, run by a trust, was sold on quality. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The issuance of books in my school library was also farcical. Many a book was taboo to the kids. I felt there was a ‘Muttawah’istic outlook to the books allotted to kids. Books were allotted according to age group. There were clear Black and White age/ grade limits for accessing books. It was a bit puritanical in my view as it frustrated the genuine readers who had grown out of the genre their age group was supposed to read- ‘Outgrown’ as in having read all the books of that category. My niece being one of them, often cribbed to me about the unfairness of it all. Her friend‘s mother was a faculty member and would get her daughter books of her choice, getting it issued in her own name. This really cheesed my niece off as I had quit the school by then and couldn’t con the librarian in a similar fashion. Well my point is ‘what is the use of controlling what you read during the hour allotted for Library when kids have access to all kinds of literature outside the walls of the school?’[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]A few years back, I came to know about Sudha Murthy setting up libraries in villages. I was enchanted to read about how she was doing that as a promise made to her grandfather as a child. Kudos, Sudha Murthy! And this generates another line of thought wouldn’t it be lovely if all those CEOs of great Indian corporates stopped writing autobiographies and took interest in rejuvenating the libraries dying in the various nooks and corners of India? NO… that’s unfair of me. Let them write and publish all they want to, but can they not spend the royalty on deserving causes like setting up rural libraries. Maybe then we can have the satisfaction of empowering those who dream of a break from ignorance and a way for slaking their thirst for knowledge.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]I shall keep dreaming of an El Dorado… a Utopia… where there are lovely libraries doling out books to all citizens to read at will… Citizens who will read, take care of and return the books in tact to those libraries. One can always dream…right?[/FONT]

 

Hi,
Anything to do with books, I love...and what greater treasure chest in this world than a library?
Happy you liked it...
Regards,
Twinsmom

 

Hello Mindian,
Where in Palakkaad are your Uncle and Aunt? I would love to know...
Regards,
Twinsmom