Issues

21Jul By Rabani GargNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

Preface to TL10: Libraries and Diversity

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares that the stories she wrote in her childhood were exactly the stories she was reading. Her characters were foreign,“ books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.” Literature offers a space from which children construct and ascribe meaning to others and themselves. It is then perhaps the foremost place of inquiry to look into how issues of diversity are taken up - Whose story does it tell? Who is this story written for? Who is not included? Whose perspective counts? These are questions that 17 year old Anokhi Mehra raises in India On My Bookshelf as she journeys through the Indian literary landscape to discover literature from her country- reading one book from each state to un...

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21Jul By Sujata Noronha4 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

Diverse Questions around Diversity

Illustration by Rhea de Souza The squawking - whirring of my 2007 modem indicated I was connected to the World Wide Web. Those days still fresh in my memory despite the cataclysmic advancement of technology playing out vividly as I try and recall my first sighting of Ismat’s Eid (Fawzia Gilani Williams; Proiti Roy -Illustrator)- a picture book that showed up on a favourite bookmarked site, www.tulikabooks.in. I immediately put it on my task list to order, drawn to the book for two reasons. First, I have been drawn to the marginal, enough to explore the cultural history of our homeland to recognise that we had Islamic influences for years before the Portuguese. Enough to want to identify with that cultural past and give my sons Arabic names. Sufficient to warrant active looking for pictu...

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20Jul By Megha Dharnidharka6 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

A Library for a Home

As soon as children enter the make-shift library, they begin to jump up and down with joy chanting "Bookwalli didi aayi! Bookwalli didi aayi!" (The lady with the books is here!). Right from the doorway they begin to crane their necks to spot their favourite books, trying to get to them before another child can beat them to it. This is a commonplace scene in a children's home in Mumbai. Children as young as 5 live in this home because they have been orphaned, abused, abandoned or have experienced other kinds of trauma or exploitation.  When families are unable or unfit to care for children, as ascertained by the Child Welfare Committee (a government body), children are declared as ‘Children in Need of Care and Protection’ and are sent to children’s homes. According to a September 2018 repo...

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18Jul By Rabani GargNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

On the Same Page

Being able to criss-cross the globe on the strength of the Internet has made it possible to engage with creative ideas, conversations, and experiences which otherwise would be beyond our reach—and at times, even beyond our imagination.  On The Same Page will bring to the reader of Torchlight, a combination of textual-audio-visual curated content, about and around libraries and bookish love.  The proliferation of digitally mediated spaces in the last few years has been accompanied by mass leveraging of social media for activism. This ‘digital activism’ uses social media to challenge and resist dominant narratives, creating affinity spaces oriented towards a common goal. Virtual conversations transcend geographical boundaries to move across locations creating powerful global movements, impa...

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17Jul By Agents of IshqNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

The Agents of Ishq Queer Reading List

Books are windows into experiences and as cultural conversations around gender identity and sexual orientation expand and multiply, they offer us lives and worlds to unpack the meaning of diversity. The fact that stultifying notions of what we can be and whom we can love are being increasingly challenged is a cause for celebration. However, this comes with a wide spectrum of responses, from bigotry and hate to confusion and anxiety. True to our philosophy here at Torchlight, we look to the bookshelf to deal with that. Happily, there is a rich and growing storehouse for those who ask questions for the purpose of educating themselves and others, those who seek resonance of their own lives or those who simply want their reading to encompass the world in all its diversity. So, as part of our t...

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16Jul By Bookworm Trust3 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

100 Diverse Books to make a Collection

A library's collection is its heart and soul, the very foundation on which a library is built. It acts as a conduit for its community to learn about the world, see themselves reflected in it, contribute to a definition of themselves and engage with varied perspectives. The collection allows us to dream, to imagine, to enter worlds without going far. A library resides in its collection and so, we felt it was important to share a slice of our diverse collection with you. Why diverse? We live in a society that is diverse in every aspect, from language, religion, ethnicity, sexuality to beliefs, experiences and opinions. A library collection needs to reflect this diversity, in order for it to truly open up stories and lives from different lenses, realities and viewpoints. A diverse collectio...

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6Jul By Paromita VohraNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

Making Friendship with Feminist Books

As a young teen and adult, my relationship with books was almost sexual. There was an endless search – for something, not quite sure what. In pre-liberalisation India, in a pre-internet world, the search for a name for my feelings, the search for a rendition of those feelings was urgent and amorphous. At New Book Land, the circular bookshop in Janpath, I remember buying for ten rupees a book of short stories by an Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Soueif, and feeling thrilled by what I read. In the British Council library I borrowed two books, because one’s cover entranced me, full of fairy tale circus images, and the other’s name delighted me – Sexing The Cherry and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Walking on the street in New York, I bought for one dollar a copy of Bell Hooks’ Black Looks. I had no...

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6Jul By Alia SinhaNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

An I don't Know Readerly Problem

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6Jul By Anokhi Mehra8 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 10 – July 2019

India On My Book Shelf

My bookshelf has looked the same for as long as I can remember. It goes from the floor up to the ceiling and is daffodil yellow in colour. It has been in my room since I started reading at the age of four. While books have been discarded and replaced over the years, the bookshelf has never been empty. The Magic Faraway Tree was a gift for my sixth birthday. One of our two copies of the Lord of the Rings made its way to my bookshelf soon after. Over the next year, my dad began reading a few pages out loud to me every night before I went to bed. Every so often, we could be heard pompously reciting, “In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie,” in gleeful unison. We eventually memorised the entire poem. I even wrote the clichéd “all that is gold does not glitter” poem on handmade ‘golden’ ...

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13Apr By Al Ameen JNo Comments

Issue 9 – April 2019, Spotlight

The gendered public library in Kerala

Modern Kerala society has a long tradition of social dialogue in public spaces. This essay will explore the participation of women in this public sphere, drawing on a short student research project focused on public libraries. Women in Kerala access public libraries not only for issuing books and reading them but also to participate in the culture of public dialogue. But how accessible and inclusive towards women are these public libraries in reality?  I address this question by drawing on a study conducted in two different areas of Kerala. The urban setting was Njanapradayini Library Neyyattinkara (Thriuvananthapuram, South Kerala) and the public and Central libraries in Thiruvananthapuram city. Libraries studied in the rural setting included VelamPothujanaVayanasala, Mayyil, Kannur distr...

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13Apr By Parul Kumtha1 Comment

Issue 9 – April 2019, Spotlight

Spaces for Reading, Spaces for Inclusion

"Each of us is an embodiment of many stories. Often, our more dominant stories could be hurting us while other healing ones lie dormant and ready to be discovered. By making room for the discovery of our healing stories, we create the spaces for inclusion."   Such was the outlook we developed and adopted towards designing reading spaces at two locations for children with special needs for an Early Intervention Centre in Mumbai. This outlook is the result of experience and associated insight : over two decades as a parent to a young adult with special needs, over three decades as a social activist working within groups striving for the inclusion of the socially marginalized, and as an architect working at breaking down barriers through ‘universal design’.   The design, which i...

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13Apr By Himanshu Burte2 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

Preface: In and Out of the Library

In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls place a ‘concretion of value’. By that measure, a good library is clearly and intensely a place. Like all ‘real’ places, it is more significant every day as physical space dissolves into the virtual with the increasing speed of bytes and vehicles. But is the space of the ‘real’ library what it appears to be? This issue of Torchlight explores the question from various perspectives, and across diverse locations and forms of enquiry. We read the library’s immovability in Kiran Vaghela’s Gujarati prose-poem inspired by the haibun form, as a valued guarantee of its continuity in time (‘…it is still there’). As a counterpoint, Alia Sinha’s graphic meditation in the ‘Readerly Problem’ floats on the hope tha...

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8Apr By Kiran Vaghela1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

ગ્રંથાલય

Illustration by Priya Kuriyan ગ્રંથાલય ઘણા સ્મરણો એવા હોય છે જે તમારી જિંદગીમાં ગૂંથાઈ જઈ ભાગ બની જાય છે જિંદગી નો અને અવિરત પણે વિસ્તર્યાં કરે છે જિંદગીભર 1968 -69 ના વર્ષ માં અમે લોકો ભુજ આવ્યા ગંગાબાઈ મિડલ સ્કૂલ ના પ્રાંગણ માં જિલ્લા ગ્રંથાલય હતું- અને આજે પણછે તેના લાંબા પગથિયાં મને શાળા ના પહેલા દિવસ થી આકર્ષ્યા કરતા હતા તેનો બાળ વિભાગ મારી પ્રિય  જગ્યા બની ગઈ અને કુમાર  મેગેઝીન કે જેના સ્થાપક કલા ગુરુ  રવિ શંકર રાવલ હતા તેને મારા માનસ પર બરાબરની  પક્કડ જમાવી ત્રીજા ચોથા ધોરણ ની મારી ઉમર માં કલા  સ્થાપત્ય આકાશ દર્શન ના લેખો એ મારા જીવન ઘડતર માં મહત્વ નો ફાળો ભજવ્યો વાંચન નું બીજ આવી રીતે વવાયું અને આજે પણ પાંગર્યા કરેછે વૃક્ષ ની જેમ મારા અંદર   શહેરની વચ્ચો વચ  રહેલો  શાંત અને  મુંગો અવકાશ બચપણ થી મારા અંદર વિસ્તર્યાં કરેછે  . આજે  પણ  તેમની શાંત આંખો માં આંખો પરોવી તેની  મ...

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8Apr By Surya Kakani1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

More than a library, by design

In a rapidly changing world that is redefining notions of the public and the private, the virtual and the real, information is now a technology that manifests right on one’s personal laptop! In such a scenario, do libraries as physical spaces still have a role to play as important public commons? We posed this question to ourselves when asked to design ‘Sundarayya Vignana Kendra’ an institutional-scaled library complex in Hyderabad’s Gachi Bowli area. While outlining the design programme for SVK, we looked at a library not just as a repository of information but also as the only public space that allows for quiet contemplation. In the physical access to knowledge that it provides, by contrast with the hidden retrieval structures of digital information, a library symbolically embodies ano...

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2Apr By Beena Choksi5 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

On the Same Page

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX Being able to criss-cross the globe on the strength of the Internet has made it possible to engage with creative ideas, conversations, and experiences which otherwise would be beyond our reach—and at times, even beyond our imagination.  On The Same Page will bring to the reader of Torchlight, a combination of textual-audio-visual curated content, about and around libraries and bookish love.   During my first years of schooling, my idea of what libraries looked like was as constant as the four-walled spaces that housed them. I knew where to go and be sure that I would find them in the same place, day after day, week after week.  Between Mondays and Fridays it was the 3-room library in my school and on weekends it was the neighbour’s curiously charming home li...

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1Apr By Sanathkumar Geetha1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

The Group’s Study

If you had not seen the board proclaiming it as an institute of technology, you would have been right in mistaking it to be a chawl. It was a cement-coloured E-shaped building looming at the edge of a slum. Along each of its six floors ran a contiguous lobby providing access to every layer of classroom stacked on top of each other. As you measured the chawl-comparison for suitability, a look at the intense security at the gate, restricted movement of teenagers inside the premises, and the general vibe of anxiety would conjure a more apt visual cue. A Jail!! It was called that even by the strictest parent of many an engineering student schooled within it. This was twenty years ago. It has got to be different now. It is hard to imagine parents with millennial aesthetics sending their childre...

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1Apr By Khushbu Prajapati4 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

No time, no space, but yes, a library: An Odisha story

Colorful books about animals, birds, plants and ‘moral’ tales hung from a rope tied to the wall of the classroom. ‘Didi’ (the teacher) took out a book and told her children to pick their desired books. It was library period and children knew it was ‘their time with books.’ They went up to the rope and picked out the ones they liked, and sat back on the floor to read. When the teacher had first entered the class, the children had been seated in their usual neat rows. But soon as they returned with their chosen books and got down to reading them, there was no place to put a foot down. Children were scattered in the room, some were reading individually while some chose to share and read. They sat in the corners of the room, side by side, back to back, encircled - each child with his or her ow...

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31Mar By Prakash Anbhule2 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

गाव ग्रंथालये व्हाया सरकारी शाळा

“कोणत्याही बालकाला शिक्षणापासून वंचित ठेवले जाणार नाही आणि त्याचे मन मारले जाईल अशा शाळेत त्यालाजावे लागणार नाही,” अशा एका जगाचे स्वप्न उराशी बाळगून महाराष्ट्रातील सातारा जिल्ह्यातील फलटण गावात१९७८ साली डॉ मॅक्सीन बर्नसन यांनी प्रगत शिक्षण संस्थेची सुरूवात केली. अगदी वंचितांपासून ते उच्चवर्गीयांपर्यंत सर्वांना गुणवत्तापूर्ण शिक्षण मिळणे गरजेचे आहे आणि प्रत्येक मूल जन्मतः शिकण्याच्या ज्या नैसर्गिक प्रेरणा घेऊन येते त्या शिक्षणाच्या प्रक्रियेत मारल्या जाऊ नयेत अथवा त्यांना लगाम बसू नये ही संस्थेची मुख्य तत्त्वे. देशभरात प्रयोगशील म्हणून ओळखली जाणारी कमला निंबकर बालभवन ही शाळा प्रगत शिक्षण संस्थेने सुरू केली. पण आपल्या स्वतःच्या एक-दोन शाळा सुरू करून आपले व्यापक स्वप्न पूर्ण होणे शक्य नाही हे संस्थेने जाणले.हे स्वप्न सत्यात उतरवायचे असेल तर मुख्य प्रवाहात असलेल्या शासनाच्या शाळांबरोबर काम क...

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30Mar By Mandara Vishwanath and Preedip Balaji1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

One walk, three public libraries, many thoughts

Mandara Vishwanath, Preedip Balaji, Rajeswari Parasa, and Akash Chandan helped organise a Public Library Walk as part of City Scripts 2019, an annual urban writings festival hosted by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in Bengaluru. In this piece, they chronicle their experiences of the walk on 9 February 2019, which began at the Mythic Society Library on Nrupathunga Road, then moved on through Cubbon Park to the State Central Library, and ended at the IIHS Library in Sadashivanagar. The walk was curated and hosted by the chief librarians of each library. It is easier than ever these days to buy a book. We live in the times of Amazon Prime guaranteeing overnight delivery and the Kindle providing easy access to a variety of books published worldwide at the click of a button....

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29Mar By Alia Sinha2 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 9 – April 2019

A Spatial Readerly Problem

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