Chiaroscuro

6Jul By Bookworm TrustNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

Breathe

Bookworm recommends these Picture Books when being alone:   Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, from An Anthology of Stories and Poems by World Book, Inc. A River Dream by Allen Say, published by Houghton Mifflin Company Draw by Raul Colon, published by Simon & Schuster Books Bertolt by Jacques Goldstyn, published by Enchanted Lion Books Silent Music by James Rumford, published by Roaring Brook Press The Cello of Mr. O by Jane Cutler, illustrated by Greg Couch, published by Dutton Children's books When I coloured in the World by Ahmadreza Ahmadi, illustrated by Ehsan Abdollahi, published by Tiny Owl The Trip by Ezra Jack Keats, published by Scholastic Inc. The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan, published by Simply Read Books The...

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21Jun By Sunder and SonatiNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

The Pangolin's Sneeze: A Lockdown Diary

We (Sunder and Sonati) have spent much of the last twenty years in growing trees and our children, here in Thekambattu. No time for anything much else than housework, land work, the kids and visitors. Now, with the boys grown up, and the trees to some extent, there was time for poetry. The poetry started as a response to the events in Kashmir. (How does one respond? has been a recurring theme in our lives). The poems more or less wrote themselves, and this continued with the coronapoems. I (Sunder) write the poems and Sonati edits them to tone down the rants or to suggest a more elegant point of view. Hope that this selection makes you pause, think, enjoy the poetry and gets you to write some poems of your own. The world needs more poets.   March 24th Stay at Home If y...

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21Jun By Jane SahiNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

From Eye-to-Eye to Screen-to-Screen

Opening Up the Book Club in Time of Lockdown A book club in Bengaluru for children between the ages of 9 and 13 was started about three years ago. The pattern has been that each month one of the members would choose a book a few weeks in advance and the other members would have a chance to read the book and come prepared for a discussion and an activity related to that book. Typically the child who chose the book would lead the whole event including choosing the next ‘host’.  It would be hosted in one of the homes of the children and sharing food and fun were an integral part of the whole happening. Most of the children had been or continue to be homeschoolers and the levels of reading and engagement with books were high.  One of the distinctive features of this Children’s Book Club is th...

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21Jun By Beena ChoksiNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

Summer Camp (HE)ART

Come April-May, almost every NGO that works with children, has some sort of a recreational camp planned to mark the end of the academic year and the start of the summer vacation. Those who are not heading for their village after schools close are all agog. At Sahyog, the summer camp has become an annual feature of its Roshan library programme; children gather for 2-3 days to learn, play, express, create, form and strengthen friendships, and feel valued. The sudden announcement of the lockdown knocked the camp off our calendar. It receded from our minds as we began to respond to the survival challenges that scores of families in the community were facing. Besides, with physical distancing strictly enforced, the question was, how is a camp even feasible? Three weeks into the lockdown, after...

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21Jun By Thejaswi ShivanandNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

Reading in the Times of Coronavirus

Is there a way to explore reading to make sense of life under lockdown? What is certain in these times is uncertainty, and as we explore this through books, is there a way ahead? The times we live in befall on people around the world once every three or more generations. While we struggle to feel the pulse of the world, Imre Kertesz is able to capture, in his Holocaust novel Fatelessness, the quality of such times — when quantum uncertainty extends to the macroscopic world of daily experience. As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up. While you come to understand everything gradually, you don't remain idle at any moment; you are already attending to your new business. You live, you act, you move, you fulfil the new requirements of each ...

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21Jun By Niranjani IyerNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

Butter And Mashed Banana, a radio play

When the lockdown was suddenly announced I, like most people, had no idea of how long we would be shut down or the absolutely tragic proportions it would take in India. The shutting down of the historic Shaheen Bagh protest site was almost like the government seized on a global emergency as an opportunity to settle an ideological score that it had been sorely losing. In the midst of a pandemic, the authorities found the time and resources to wipe out graffiti of dissent, as if it was more dangerous and contagious than the virus. For all its rhetoric of national unity to ram the CAA through, the insincerity of the government’s commitment to the common Indian was revealed soon after, as the poorly planned, poorly executed lockdown left millions in deep economic, social and psychological dist...

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20Jun By Lakshmi KarunakaranNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

The Library is Present

Keeping a community library alive during times of COVID 19 lockdown As the country came to a near halt during the COVID 19 lockdown in late March 2020, like many library educators across the nation, I wondered what the lockdown meant for libraries, their functioning and purpose. As hunger, displacement and the pandemic gripped the nation, books and reading were defined as non-essential services. I joined my team at Hasiru Dala in relief work for waste­-pickers and other informal workers in Bangalore and witnessed some of most disturbing sights of my life. While waste management was listed as an essential service by the government, informal waste pickers who remain on the forefront of the informal solid waste management framework of any city were not recognised as essential service provide...

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20Jun By Samina Mishra1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 13 – June 2020

The Lockdown Art Project

Lockdown is a word. Lockdown became the world. For over 3 months, we have been in varying degrees of being locked down in India (and in some places continue to be) – or on the streets, depending upon our accident of birth. People have been trying to make sense of what this means for the present and for the future in different ways, and one of the coping mechanisms seems to have been the explosion of art on the internet – old work, new work, work created specifically for these times. For children, there has been a burst of storytelling and educational sessions. Often brand-building exercises in this strange and alienating time, many of these have been about providing content for children to engage with. Some allow for children to ask questions and interact with resource people but the limit...

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30Jan By Jennifer Thomas and Alia SinhaNo Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

The Preface to Issue 12: Libraries and Schools

This issue of Torchlight: A Journal of Libraries and Bookish Love, explores the infrastructure- physical and emotional- that gives rise to school libraries, and what libraries can represent not just for educational spaces but also for a democracy. Between the conception and final publication of this issue, in a matter of months, the world around us has changed leaving our democracy transmogrified. The weeks leading up to this issue saw many acts of senseless violence including a library being attacked, tear-gassed and vandalised. However, these weeks have also seen libraries spontaneously spring up around us alongside roads, at bus stops and in bastis – we will read to resist. For this issue, the definition of a “library” extends from the brick and mortar of the physical building, to the ...

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30Jan By Sujata Noronha2 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

Exploring Partition in the Library

Foreword by the Editors For those of us who went to conventional schools that had library spaces, we may (often )think of the library as a place that perhaps smelt of old books, where the main activities involved being quiet, returning or borrowing a book and occasionally, if we were lucky, listening to a story read aloud. We feature this article in this issue for a few special reasons. Not only does it make us question our assumptions of what a school library should be like and what it should do, it also surprises us with its definition of a different kind of school. This study documents an intensive exploration of a difficult theme- that of India's Partition- by a Goa-based  library educator working with a small group of home-schooling/schooled students. It is a compelling account of wh...

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30Jan By Nirupama Kaushik2 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

Reinventing the School Library

“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.” – Harold Howe A poster with this powerful quote adorns the bulletin board in the library at The Somaiya School (TSS), where I work. My journey as a Library Educator began in 2017. It was a new role, very different from teaching in a classroom. I was eager to dive into the job. My opinion of school libraries before this was heavily influenced by my own experience in school where books were stuffed inside cupboards; guarded under the watchful eye of the librarian behind the desk. We were allowed to issue books only during the weekly library period. As we picked an old magazine from a neglected pile, ‘pin drop’ silence prevailed. Library period became a time to catch up on incomplete work. Ultimately, the...

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30Jan By Timira Gupta5 Comments

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

Teachers as Readers and its Ripple Effect!

“When I started taking books into my classes, I realised my students made a note of it, went to the librarian and pestered her to give them the same book,” says Kaynat, a Primary English and Math teacher at Akshara High School.“I saw the effect it had on my students who wanted to be well-read and join conversations on whether they have read a certain book or not.” This article focuses on the impact books and a thoughtful school library programme can have on teachers, developing a teacher’s professional and personal capacities, and how it also deeply impacts the students of the school bringing about a reading culture for all. The Akshara context Akshara is a not-for-profit school, following the ICSE board. English, in most cases, is the third (if not fourth) language for our children a...

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30Jan By Torchlight Team1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

School-wali Library

Reflecting on the theme for this edition, Libraries and Schools, the Torchlight editorial team felt that the act of listening (really listening) to the voices of primary users of the school library - its students - is a valuable part of library work. Now, we are delighted to share the experience of listening with you, through this audio piece which details the experiences of students from a government school in Delhi. The piece presents a range of reflections, responses and meanderings from interviews with students from classes 3 to 8, about their relationship with their school library and with library books. So settle into your seat and get your tiffin-box (and headphones) out, as you hear what Anisha, Yogit, Naved, Shivam, Sameer, Mayank, and Anshul have to say.   Interviews b...

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30Jan By Neha Gupta1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

क्रांति के लिए   किताबें

15 दिसंबर को जामिया मिलिया इस्लामिया में सिटीजन अमेंडमेंट एक्ट (CAA) के खिलाफ शांतिपूर्ण विरोध करते छात्रों और शिक्षकों पर दिल्ली पुलिस ने डंडे बरसाए; पुलिस ने इस हिंसा के दौरान डॉ ज़ाकिर हुसैन लाइब्रेरी में भी उपद्रव मचाया । इस घटना  से उत्पन्न “रीड फॉर रिवोल्यूशन” एक शक्तिशाली अहिंसक विरोध है । पुलिस की बर्बरता ने नागरिकता संशोधन अधिनियम के खिलाफ चल रहे राष्ट्रव्यापी आंदोलन को एक नया प्रोत्साहन दिया । पूरे भारत में लोग बड़ी संख्या में CAA के खिलाफ अपनी असहमति व्यक्त करने के लिए इकट्ठा हो रहे हैं । यह क़ानून और इसके लागू होने का तरीका असंवैधानिक होने के साथ-साथ हमारे देश की धर्मनिरपेक्ष परंपरा पर भी सवाल उठाता है । जामिया के छात्रों का विरोध - जो पुलिस हिंसा के वक़्त उनके पुस्तकालय में हुए नुक्सान के बाद शुरू हुए - असंख्यक रूप लेता है । इसमें शामिल हैं गीत और कविता, भाषण, कैंडल मार्च और रीड ...

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30Jan By Torchlight Team1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

Mad, Bad and Wicked: Censorship in School Libraries and its Subversion

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single school in possession of a library must censor its collection. Or so we suspected. Schools are inevitably ideologically charged institutions that represent precise social and historical concerns of their times, and function with their own frameworks of disciplining/ shaping the cultural understanding of their students. It follows that certain texts would be considered inflammatory, unsuitable, or too dangerous for students (children) to read... texts that could turn them mad, bad or wicked! Along with the educators and administrators of these educational institutions, parents, peers, and even children themselves may participate in the act of censorship. It also follows that young readers would be keen to access forbidden texts and and f...

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30Jan By Beena Choksi1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

On The Same Page

From the Margins 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. In a world beset with inequities, it’s not surprising that marginalised people are in the majority. Over the centuries, libraries have made available to marginalised populations what has been consistently denied to them: access, voice, and visibility. Together they lay the foundation for their empowerment. Here are some glimpses from across the world of what place libraries have in th...

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30Jan By Alia Sinha1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

A Scholarly Readerly Problem

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30Jan By Sayujya S1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

A Life-Story Through Libraries

She sits at her desk— A thirty-year-old Sharing her love for books With a class full of students. She taps the Pen in her hand Between her teeth, Reminiscing. Recording… * Age: Five Lusaka. School. The one hour she loves— Library Hour! In a darkish corner Of the library, She curls up— Cat-like— Lost in her own world, Ignoring her classmates Who clearly don’t care To read. A pony-tail, shorts and tee, Knee-length socks and A pair of pink shoes Wander through a maze of books. In the yellow light, The stacks seem tall… intimidating, Like giant tomes against her Puny height. A tiny, unsure hand Picks a book. She buries herself— Like the bookworm-in-the-apple-artwork Splashed across the library wall— Into a beanbag on an Alphabet-mat, Immersed in a world of Very human animals. * Age: Te...

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30Jan By Anam Zakaria1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 12 – February 2020

Classrooms for Peace

“Hindus got enraged and started the genocide of Muslims…Englishmen were the rulers and Hindus were the enemy,” reads one of the lines from a class 9&10 school textbook from Punjab, Pakistan (Subject: Urdu Grammar and Composition for the Academic Year 2012-2013). Another book from the same academic year, designed for a younger age group of class 5 states, “Hindus can never become the true friends of Muslims.”[1] Both of these textbooks are endorsed by the Pakistani government and distributed across public schools as well as many private low-income schools across the province. Textbooks from other provinces too often do not fare much better. Stories of one-sided violence of Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims at Partition are entrenched in the literature and reinforced in classroom setting...

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26Oct By Jewel, Anandita and Sujata1 Comment

Chiaroscuro, Issue 11 – October 2019

The Librarian in Picture Books

An exploratory exercise on Librarian-based illustrations in Picture Books By Jewel Gomes, Anandita Rao and Sujata Noronha For most of us who work at Bookworm, a library-based organisation, the library is our universe. From reading other research on the library as a place and the place of the library in literature we have been thinking and seeking more understanding around this construct to both understand ourselves and our work but to also look at how positioning these pieces of literature on our library shelves can impact our readers. We are also curious in trying to understand how the place of the library has been changing and if literature records these shifts. In books for middle school and older, we are quite easily able to talk about how the library is positioned in say J.K Rowli...

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