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 people whose lives you will find entwined in these narratives.

In our ‘Spotlight‘ section:

With ‘My Bookish Desires‘ by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, revel in the warmth and sensuality of desiring three very different masculine heroes from the books from his past. Find yourself provoked, bemused and beguiled by Sujata Noronha’s impassioned plea for the case of non-readers in “‘Bookish Love? Bah!“. Immerse yourself in the surreal and reflective, and in the cadences and rhythms of Amlanjyoti Goswami’s voice, both written and spoken in ‘A Line from a poem‘, Torchlight’s first poetry podcast.

In Dashrath Sharma’s moving piece किताबों से प्यार find yourself caught up in his encounters with books and print over the years, and how the love and loss of books and reading can leave an indelible imprint. Discover The Bookshop Band – a small group of people far away (Bath, UK), whose art inhabits the delicate space where music and literature meet.

In our section ‘Chiaroscuro‘, we invite you to:

Lose yourself in the fragments of people’s lives and loves captured in books gifted and kept, with Neha Yadav’s collaborative photo-study featuring different contributors and their ‘Book Dedications‘.

Relive the naivety and passions of adolescent desire for imagined people and find insight into the interior life of a self-avowed Fictiophile in Pearl DSilva’s essay, ‘It’s Just a Little Crush‘. Discover the peculiar transformative magic of everyday objects and materials when they collide with books and readerly love in Aarti Srinivasan’s video ‘For the Love of Bookmarks!‘, another collaborative piece with entries from many different contributors.

In Arundhati Ghosh’s ‘Of the Inn and the Traveller‘ find out how the experience of growing up in a small town can be inextricable from constant migration and the unshakeable belief in books and libraries as imagined refuge. Explore four wildly different historical journeys that are interwoven with the love of books and the spirit of exploration, in Beena Choksi’s recurring feature ‘On the Same Page.‘

Take a critical look at the fantasy genre in ‘Not Just Fantasy‘, Aashutosha Lele’s personal and retrospective essay on the author Ursula LeGuin. Find out how the right story at the right time can radically reconfigure someone’s entire existence in Kevin Shane’s ‘The Books that Changed my Life‘. Discover the riskiness of reading books about love in this time’s ‘Readerly Problem‘, a comic strip by Alia Sinha.

At its heart, this edition is to do with connection, with shared delight. Too much delight? Maybe. But in times like ours right now- where narratives of hatred and divisiveness threaten to overwhelm all others, perhaps there is value in the very lightness and buoyancy inherent in celebrating books, readers, communities across the world bound together in this shared love. It affirms the idea that pleasure is not necessarily a precondition of frivolity. Pleasure can be rebellion. Or escape. Or communion.

Whatever bookish love may mean to you, dear readers, we hope you find something here that resonates.

Welcome back.

-Alia and Aarti