Issues

It is a winter evening in Delhi and the warm lights and cosy atmosphere of Café Turtle are an appropriate setting for a conversation about bookish love. Usha Mukunda and Sujata Noronha are self-described “almost library evangelists”, women who love stories, books and libraries, and are deeply committed to passing that love on to children. As someone who also shares that love, I feel privileged in sharing this moment with them, reflecting on people and books that can change lives. And so, they tell me about Miss Moore. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I listen to Usha and Sujata tell me about their encounter with this book, 'Miss Moore Thought Otherwise.' I listen and I think of this history and the contributions of those who came before us – the storytellers, the ac...

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...

Imagine you are an explorer in a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape who comes across an abandoned house. The occupants have long departed but all their belongings are still there. Which of these things should you look at first to understand what kind of people the former inhabitants were? My suggestion is that you spend time looking over their books. But we don't have to wait for a nuclear winter to perform this thought experiment on our own personal libraries. The books we possess stand for the things we are now, or were at one time, truly interested in. They are not the most utilitarian of our possessions. They don't keep us in physical comfort. They aren't food or fuel. The only reason to acquire a book is to have a specific interest in the things it talks about. This makes our per...