Author: Thejaswi Shivanand

Thejaswi Shivanand is a part of Centre for Learning, an alternative school located near Bangalore. He teaches biology, statistics and chemistry to senior students and is closely involved in the school’s nature education and library programmes.

<strong>Reading</strong><i> in the Times of Coronavirus</i>

21Jun

By Thejaswi ShivanandNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

Reading in the Times of Coronavirus

Is there a way to explore reading to make sense of life under lockdown? What is certain in these times is uncertainty, and as we explore this through books, is there a way ahead? The times we live in befall on people around the world once every three or more generations. While we struggle to feel the pulse of the world, Imre Kertesz is able to capture, in his Holocaust novel Fatelessness, the quality of such times — when quantum uncertainty extends to the macroscopic world of daily experience. As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up. While you come to understand everything gradually, you don't remain idle at any moment; you are already attending to your new business. You live, you act, you move, you fulfil the new requirements of each ...

24Jan

By Thejaswi ShivanandNo Comments

Axis, Issue 1 - March 2017

Thematic Reading in the Library

I work in a small school near Bangalore where the curriculum is committed to an active place for the library space as the children grow up over the years they are at school. The engagement with the space happens in multiple ways across the spectrum of ages, of which I would like to share my experience with children of the ages fourteen to eighteen. While I am not a librarian, my work is closely associated with the library, where I share my interest in books with these children as an anchor for their library programme. The library at our school, like many others, is a traditional library dominated by books, while not being traditional when it comes to access and use of books. Books aren’t locked, are regularly looked after with care, and used in many ways by an array of readers. Many...