Issues

27Apr By Amlanjyoti GoswamiNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018, Spotlight

A line from a poem - A poetry podcast

A line from a poem A line From a poem Came to me in dream In two versions: Almost like a legal document I did not know if It was a verb Or a mood I had to change Or perhaps, A whole person Broken up, fragmented In need of flight and Root, At the same time. A branch breaking off in perfect Calm To travel a safe distance Before disappearing From the bound of memory Forever.   A philosopher meets his match I never asked For the moon But she Arrived at my door One stolen evening Just like a summer storm Drenched and asking To be in Carrying the past as if It was only yesterday A baby in her arms Hers. My door is always open, I say, Come in. The past is a forgotten - extinct - species. At that time, I was wrapped in...

Read More

26Apr By The Bookshop BandNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018, Spotlight

The Bookshop Band

Stories sometimes seem like living creatures. The strong ones evolve, flit from one form to another and back again. They pass through languages, forms, format, are not tied to any one medium. There are stories that transcend boundaries and forge connections, sometimes because of the story’s power, sometimes because of the underlying structures that give them power. Take Lewis Caroll's instant classic, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. Steeped in symbolism, riddles, nonsense songs and dream logic, the book has haunted and delighted readers since 1865. But- this is the important part- even if you haven't read the book but are reading this, its surreal quality, vivid colours and young protagonist possibly inhabit some part of your consciousness. Translations, adaptations, abridged versions...

Read More

26Apr By Alia Sinha and Aarti Srinivasan1 Comment

Issue 5 – April 2018

Preface to Issue 5

Dearest Readers Greetings. It seems to be the open knowledge that our times are marching towards doom, gloom and neatly engineered despair. But we at Torchlight: A Journal of Libraries and Bookish Love believe that books can hold ways to confront the realities of troubling times. In celebration of books and all they can represent, the editorial team at Torchlight is thrilled to present to you our fifth and current edition- on Bookish Love itself. ''Bookish Love!'' Those with even mild exposure to Torchlight might have heard these words used rather freely here. If you've ever wondered about this (possibly made-up) phrase, this issue will offer you a multiplicity of voices and perspectives on what bookish love can entail - for our contributors, readers and editors... and for all the other ...

Read More

26Apr By Aashutosha LeleNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

Not Just Fantasy

I was stuck in fantasy. Ursula Le Guin helped me look beyond. A few weeks ago, I heard that Ursula K. le Guin, the notable American science-fiction and fantasy author had passed away. My first reaction on hearing that was, “What? Was she still alive?” For some reason, I had always thought of her as one of those old-time authors, contemporaries of people like J.R.R. Tolkien. Something about the way she wrote didn’t seem characteristic of a ‘modern’ author - or what ‘modern’ meant by the definition I created in my juvenile simplicity. Image courtesy: http://aboulder.com I picked up my first Le Guin book, A Wizard of Earthsea, when I was in my fantasy-obsessed phase, having, as a compulsive re-reader, just made my way through Tolkien’s A Lord of the Rings for the millionth time. I was br...

Read More

26Apr By Kevin ShaneNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

The Books That Changed My Life

Illustration credits: Anisha Thampy I recently finished a project wherein Quicksand, the company I work for, undertook the improvement of the user experience with a book-reading app for children. Over the course of the project, the team spent much time discussing the transformative effect that reading had had on our own lives. In our small way, we were trying to help replicate the impact books had on our own lives; we were stewarding the same love we have for reading to a younger generation. Our approach to work at Quicksand is rooted in human-centered design, which in turn is fundamentally concerned with empathy. You engage with people in their contexts in an attempt to experience their lives. Once you understand how a particular product, service, or system affects them, you can work ...

Read More

26Apr By Arundhati GhoshNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

Of the Inn and the Traveller

My childhood was very quiet. Both my parents were busy doctors and would return home late at night. I would get back from school in the afternoon and pad around the silent, empty house alone, walking in and out of doors, placing my ears on walls to listen. But the walls were reticent too. The house was tiny so there weren’t too many variations to my daily routes through it. Yet I would poke at corners and pull at things stacked away pretending to see them for the first time. On one such occasion when I was six, perhaps seven years old, I discovered two big boxes and one old almirah - full of books! Illustration by Alia Sinha These belonged to my parents who had to leave their homes in a hurry when they eloped. Busy with work and setting their lives on a new course, they perhaps did n...

Read More

26Apr By Pearl DsilvaNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

It’s Just a Little Crush

The craggy cliffs are treacherous; the gentle bobbing of the brook nearby seems to help in calming my racing heartbeat. For there he is, standing tall and handsome; all grown-up and touted to be the next best super sleuth of the country (not mine, but nevertheless). He is just as I imagined him- fourteen. Dressed in a jersey and shorts, he turns slowly towards me as I hear his name roll from my lips…”Julian”, I sigh and run towards him, hopping from stone to stone in the brook. Splash! I lose my balance and fall into the brook…and I’m shaken from my pleasant daydream as I sit and watch the kids swim mindlessly in the indoor pool. I blush scarlet. Did I just say Julian? I look around sheepishly, hoping no one has heard me. Growing up in an all-girls school, our tryst with boys (apart from ...

Read More

26Apr By Neha YadavNo Comments

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...

Read More

26Apr By Beena Choksi2 Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

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. Book-journeys I recall a friend who wasn’t much of a reader being put in a quandary by a college application essay question: ‘If you had to take no more than 3 books with you to live for the rest of your life on an uninhabited island, which would you choose?’ Although posed as a hypothetical question, it resonates strongly with any book lover who knows that journeys, brief or lengthy, casual or purpose...

Read More

25Apr By Aarti Srinivasan1 Comment

Issue 5 – April 2018

For the love of Bookmarks!

A collaborative piece put together by book-crazy, bookmark-obsessed humans. Some see a train ticket, a reader sees a bookmark. If you love reading, you might agree that almost anything you look at can turn into something that sits between the pages of your book. Some might be bookmarks gifted by a loved one, some might be special because they are handmade, some that have travelled the world with you, some that are random objects you lay your hands on, and some clearly not objects because they come crawling towards your book. The video here has a collection of all these and more. And what strings it together, is a lovely French song by Carla Bruni, with its refrain ‘someone told me that you still love me’, that tries to capture a bookish-love triangle between books, bookmarks and the ...

Read More

25Apr By Alia SinhaNo Comments

Issue 5 – April 2018

One More Readerly Problem

You MUST click on the image to see the whole cartoon!

Read More

21Jan By Sujata Noronha3 Comments

Axis, Issue 4 – January 2018

Fitting In: Technology and Children’s Library Practice

A reflective essay Photo: Nijugrapher Libraries used to be the record keepers of the past. They were expected to be slightly antiquated because they were meant to enable us to retreat, to discover something recorded and make sense of it in the present. The atmosphere was a collusion of many lives and millions of ideas living in a confined space. There was the air of expectancy but also of the need to linger, to seek at length and to dwell on what was discovered.   Today there is a subtle pressure on libraries to be spaces of the future.  Open, bright, airy. Chrome and glass are considered fitting materials and an absence of clutter is modernist. Time is critical and the faster you find something the seemingly more efficient the library system appears to be.   S...

Read More

20Jan By Krishna Warrier and Ketan Kothari1 Comment

Issue 4 – January 2018, Spotlight

Podcast: How the Visually Impaired Read in India

I never imagined that blind persons could be voracious readers till I met a visually impaired person who introduced me to DAISY. Now before you conjure up visions liked I did of DAISY being a beautiful young woman with a heart of gold, let me clarify that DAISY is not a human being. But wait, we are jumping the gun. My name is Krishna Warrier and I am chatting today with Ketan Kothari. Ketan is a first-class post graduate from Mumbai University who works for an organisation called Sightsavers, he is an avid reader, and happens to be blind.  Krishna: Ketan, what exactly is DAISY? Ketan: DAISY is a digital system which is accessible to print disabled people so the acronym DAISY stands for Digitally Accessible System—rather, Digitally Accessible Information System and it enables us ...

Read More

20Jan By Selvakumar Jaganathan7 Comments

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

Memoir of a librarian

I love libraries. So it was no wonder that I graduated in Library Science. The time was the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium. Information Technology slowly entered into the field of library and crawled into the domain of librarianship. My interest in the subject drove me to take up "short term industry oriented technology courses" from a CSIR institute ­– CDS / ISIS; a course on freely distributed software package by UNESCO, suited for Bibliographical applications and used as catalogues in libraries, and a similar course on "Information Technology for libraries." As a result of that, I joined a very prestigious institute in Bangalore as a Library Trainee without any difficulty. The institute used to take six candidates every year, exposing them during trai...

Read More

20Jan By Manjula PadmanabhanNo Comments

Issue 4 – January 2018, Spotlight

Libraries

When I was eleven years old, one of my favourite places was the Nielson Hays Library in Bangkok, Thailand. It was a huge building, with tall ceilings and white-washed walls. On days when my Mother needed the car, the driver would collect me from school and leave me at the Library to spend an hour or two on my own. Nielson Hays Library, Bangkok (Photo: neilsonhayslibrary.com) That library had a special room just for children's books. It was a tiny building with wooden walls, tiled roof and polished-wood floor, surrounded by water, like a moat. You had to step across a little bridge to get inside. It was like being inside a castle made for books. I planned to read every book in there, in alphabetical order! But of course, I soon decided against that because I preferred some kinds of bo...

Read More

13Jan By Tanvi DomadiaNo Comments

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

Where Tech Meets Storytelling

Ramu and his friends sit huddled together around a computer screen, playing a game called “Rory’s Story Cubes.” Shaili hits the spacebar key and the 9 virtual dices roll. When it stops, the dice fall next to each other in this order: “I’ll go first,” says Ramu. His narration begins: “An arrow hits a boy playing on the streets.” Shyam looks at the second image of a footprint, pauses for a minute to think and adds, “The boy wonders what just hit him and sees footprints of an animal near him.” It’s Shaili’s turn next: “The boy called Ali follows the footsteps across the bridge.” Ramu excitedly cuts in: “Ali soon comes to a tree where the prints have mysteriously disappeared.” “He searches for the prints in all directions,” continues Shyam. “Ali hears a voice from below t...

Read More

12Jan By Aarti Srinivasan2 Comments

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

Can You Snuggle up with Your Kindle?

Young readers talk about Lane Smith's It's a Book.   It is a commonplace on the part of Generation Y to lament that kids just don’t read these days. Most of the blame coalesce into one giant finger that points accusingly at the internet and the many, many gadgets that enable young kids to gambol freely among digital terrains. It’s a troubling thought indeed that right now, there is a whole wave of children who are more at home with Twitter and Snapchat than Tinkle and Superman. It is precisely these concerns that Lane Smith’s excellent It’s a Book speaks to. A simple (and hugely fun!) back-and-forth between a curious jackass and a reader monkey forms the content of Smith’s book. Without giving away the ending, we’d just like to say that the conclusion of this brief story will warm al...

Read More

12Jan By Rajashree GandhiNo Comments

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

Has Internet Done to Poetry What Spring Does to the Cherry Tree?

Exploring poetry’s roller coaster journey into the digital world From rare yellowing anthologies waiting to be discovered in the last aisle of the library to backlit daily Instagram feed, poetry has travelled a long way. Unlike some successful Tumblr and Insta poets, the most celebrated poets of our world cannot claim to have gone “viral”. It fascinates me how the digital world has almost entirely altered how poetry is produced, shared and consumed. While each one of us millennials has strong opinions on how the internet has ruined/revolutionised parts of our life, we have yielded to its power and played along. Poetry readers are no different. There is a lot to celebrate about poetry on the internet along with legitimate concerns raised by the alert witnesses of this overhaul. Before...

Read More

12Jan By Beena Choksi1 Comment

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

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. Picturing the journey: Print to digital Long before research was undertaken to establish the significant role pictorial representations play in developing literacy, language, and a host of cognitive skills in young children, picture books occupied a distinct place in the world of children’s publishing.   So much so that since 1937 picture books became award-worthy starting with the Cald...

Read More

12Jan By Alia Sinha2 Comments

Alt Shift, Issue 4 – January 2018

Book Feels For Broke Bibliophiles: Exploring Bookishness in New Media

On the social media behemoth Facebook exists a group known as 'Book Deals for Broke Bibliophiles' — a vibrant online community of self-identified book-lovers who spend as much time on this forum discussing and discovering new books, favorite authors, short stories, book-photography and other bookish things as they do reading, presumably. As per the description given — and as indicated by the name —"This Group is intended to suggest curated online book deals in India. The objective is to make you spend bare minimum to buy your favourite books." It was started in December 2014 by a person who prefers to keep their identity anonymous, originally going by the name "Broke Bibliophile." A fascinating figure, this person is charismatic, polite, responsive to other members and always, alway...

Read More