Author: Neha Yadav

Neha Yadav is currently working towards getting a PhD in Literature, one panic attack at a time. She can also be found wasting time arguing with bots over at Twitter under @nay_yeah
<i>Lockdown-Proof: </i><strong>Booklovers Tell us About the Titles They Just Can’t Get Through</strong>
Issue 13 – June 2020

Lockdown-Proof: Booklovers Tell us About the Titles They Just Can’t Get Through

During the series of lockdowns enforced in India since the pandemic came to our airports, life, as we know it, has turned on its head. For the privileged among it, it has meant a greater familiarity with the four walls of our houses, experiments in the kitchen, Zoom hijinks, work from home irritants, and worshipping at the altar of reliable high-speed wifi. To the reading community, the lockdown ostensibly grants what we swear up and down is the only thing keeping us from devouring as many books as we like: time. As weeks pile upon weeks however, many of us have had to come to terms with the fact that there are some titles and authors that even an unprecedented pandemic-wrought lockdown won’t make palatable. Below, readers from all over the country share with us the titles/authors they ju...
<strong>Fifteen Copies and Counting:</strong><i> Why Wuthering Heights Keeps Multiplying on My Shelf</i>
Issue 8 – January 2019, Spotlight

Fifteen Copies and Counting: Why Wuthering Heights Keeps Multiplying on My Shelf

Like most people in ishq waala love with books, I have amassed a loosely curated personal library over the years. Illustration by Alia Sinha My parents, like most newly upwardly mobile folk who want to give their children a better education than the one they received, made fine distinctions between useful and wasteful reading all throughout my school years. This meant that all off-the-syllabus fiction was looked at askance; only textbooks constituted serious reading. My school years were therefore spent hungering after books. The school library allowed only one book per week and even that privilege was taken away during exam months and board years; very few peers read so borrowing was out too, and Kindle and Nook and other handy e-readers were still a few years away. I made the best of ...
<strong>Book </strong><i>Dedications</i>
Issue 5 – April 2018

Book Dedications

Hi. Do you feel this? You don’t know me and yet here you are, following a stranger’s string of words, trusting they will lead somewhere. Go back to the first line again, won’t you? Aha! Made you look. Made you listen. All language and thus all literature is, and always has been, about this search for connection, for the community. In the oral tradition, Homer sings the song of Ilium to his people; several oceans away, Vyasa tells a similar story of bloodshed and betrayal to another set of listeners. Sutradharas narrate tales of high-born figures to rapt audiences; folk singers and poets travel from place to place weaving magic with melody and words. After the advent of print though, even that worthy Victorian institution of the family – with its practice of fireside read-alouds – c...
<i>Preface </i>to Issue 4
Axis, Issue 4 – January 2018

Preface to Issue 4

Dear Torchlighters, Technology is everywhere. Inventions that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago are essential components of everyday life now. Libraries and readers too have been swept up in its all-encompassing embrace; Kindle screens wink at us from bedside tables, archives become digitally available, and writers tweet out stories in real time to a breathless audience of millions. As with all other change, this too has its share of nay-sayers. Some worries and complaints – about elitism and privilege, shortened attention spans and lost nuances, digital isolation – are entirely legitimate and, to varying degrees, already apparent. The need of the hour seems to be platforms where a multiplicity of voices from all walks of life can think through, at some leisure, the ramif...
Library in My Colours
Issue 3 - September 2017, Spotlight Archives

Library in My Colours

What Happens When You Ask 8-10 Year Old Kids to Draw Their Libraries?   Chaos. Total, utter chaos. Popular wisdom tells us that we are easier off herding a bunch of wild cats than devising plans that hinge on the cooperation of young children. So when yours truly commandeered a small group of miniature patrons at Panjim’s Bookworm library on a languorous Saturday morning for this project, she did it with a healthy dose of trepidation. She was righteously justified later when, despite the assistance of a supernaturally efficient and clearly beloved instructor, the kids refused to draw anything that even slightly resembled a conventional library. Buildings, seating, librarians, even books proved optional in the reading spaces these children envisioned. Life is what happens ...
Story Stacks
Alt Shift Archives, Issue 2 - June 2017

Story Stacks

In 1993, Armenian-American artist Nina Katchadourian devised an unconventional way of extracting meaning from books. She began running her eyes over entire bookshelves, whether in private homes or specialized collections, and pulling out titles that seemed to suggest a story. She would then group these in a cluster that hinted at some self-enclosed tale. And the Sorted Books project was born. Nina K's project recognises the untapped potential of all book collections. Readers are invariably gluttons for stories: oral narratives, family anecdotes, tall tales, local gossip; we will accept all with gratitude and then go out looking for some more. Why, then, must the storytelling power of a book be thought finished with the last page? Sorted Books is also an exercise in biography. These cluste...
The Girl Who Ate Books
Alt Shift Archives, Issue 1 - March 2017

The Girl Who Ate Books

Dear reader, Have you ever been strong-armed into attending a party? Have you, despite a magnificent display of resistance and reluctance, found yourself obliged to drive over to a colleague/friend’s house, gift and graces in tow, to mingle with fellow humans? On such occasions, when small talk has petered out and lots of awkward accidental eye contact has been made, have you found yourself seeking out a quiet balcony? Out in the blessed dark, away from the dhin-chak-dhin-chak of dance music, have you found yourself longing for the company of a book? A book that gets you; a book that is at once a billet-doux to the quiet readerly life and an account of the mad adventures and passion that lurk within pages and souls? Reader, meet The Girl Who Ate Books.  Nilanjana Roy is one of our mos...