This issue’s theme, Libraries: Personal and Communal, comes from the experiences of people we like to see as part of the growing Torchlight tribe – people who have sought to work with books, libraries, and reading because of how it has enriched their lives. Many have expanded this deeply personal engagement to inhabit a larger space, to grow a community in. Torchlight itself is such an endeavor and so we felt, it is worth asking the question: What drives this desire to share this love, almost compulsively, and what comes from it? The resultant stories are about libraries, rules, aspirations, indulgences – and all the intersections between personal love and public spaces.
In Spotlight, we focus on personal love in Neha Yadav’s Fifteen Copies and Counting, a story about the several copies of Wuthering Heights that have made their home in her personal library. And accompanying that is an example of growing a community bound by this love. Sudhanva Deshpande’s photo essay gives us a tour of the library at Studio Safdar, a space named after Safdar Hashmi. The Sunday library here attracts children from Studio Safdar’s working class neighbourhood, bringing alive Safdar’s famous poem for children, Kitabein Kuch Kehna Chahti Hain / Books Want To Say Something.
In Chiaroscuro, Alia Sinha’s A Personal Readerly Problem imagines whimsically whether the books share this love too. And in This Book Need Not Be Returned, Aravinda Anantharaman celebrates that love in a story about community libraries and reading movements that owe their beginnings to a book lover or two. In Collections: Who is Responsible? Sujata Noronha explores the peculiar problem of the Indian public library system where this love for books is apparently missing. We also present the changing face of this love as Sayoni Basu mulls over the pros and cons of going digital in Screen Paper Stories and tells us why adopting the Kindle is not blasphemous.
Book love, like all love, shows us what we can become. Read about the possibilities that lie in community library spaces in Shataakshi Verma’s The New Face of Revolution, about a community library in a Mumbai slum community. Named for Rohith Vemula, this library offers young people from the dalit community a window to other worlds. Then listen to Samina Mishra’s reading of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things that reiterates this idea of possibility intertwined in library bookshelves.
We also have our regular feature, On The Same Page, this time bringing together videos available on the internet that present a diversity of perspectives on library rules and library guardians. And finally, find a story that resonates with yours in Bookshelf Travels as readers share accounts of that one book they borrowed and never returned.
We hope this issue of Torchlight takes you into those book spaces that you have played in and that have nurtured your love for books and libraries. Even as we celebrate all the good that comes of being surrounded by books, we hope this issue also provokes the question: are there other ways – personal, public, in-between ways – that can spread this love?