Writeups

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares that the stories she wrote in her childhood were exactly the stories she was reading. Her characters were foreign,“ books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.” Literature offers a space from which children construct and ascribe meaning to others and themselves. It is then perhaps the foremost place of inquiry to look into how issues of diversity are taken up - Whose story does it tell? Who is this story written for? Who is not included? Whose perspective counts? These are questions that 17 year old Anokhi Mehra raises in India On My Bookshelf as she journeys through the Indian literary landscape to discover literature from her country- reading one book from each state to un...

Illustration by Rhea de Souza The squawking - whirring of my 2007 modem indicated I was connected to the World Wide Web. Those days still fresh in my memory despite the cataclysmic advancement of technology playing out vividly as I try and recall my first sighting of Ismat’s Eid (Fawzia Gilani Williams; Proiti Roy -Illustrator)- a picture book that showed up on a favourite bookmarked site, www.tulikabooks.in. I immediately put it on my task list to order, drawn to the book for two reasons. First, I have been drawn to the marginal, enough to explore the cultural history of our homeland to recognise that we had Islamic influences for years before the Portuguese. Enough to want to identify with that cultural past and give my sons Arabic names. Sufficient to warrant active looking for pictu...

As soon as children enter the make-shift library, they begin to jump up and down with joy chanting "Bookwalli didi aayi! Bookwalli didi aayi!" (The lady with the books is here!). Right from the doorway they begin to crane their necks to spot their favourite books, trying to get to them before another child can beat them to it. This is a commonplace scene in a children's home in Mumbai. Children as young as 5 live in this home because they have been orphaned, abused, abandoned or have experienced other kinds of trauma or exploitation.  When families are unable or unfit to care for children, as ascertained by the Child Welfare Committee (a government body), children are declared as ‘Children in Need of Care and Protection’ and are sent to children’s homes. According to a September 2018 repo...

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.  The proliferation of digitally mediated spaces in the last few years has been accompanied by mass leveraging of social media for activism. This ‘digital activism’ uses social media to challenge and resist dominant narratives, creating affinity spaces oriented towards a common goal. Virtual conversations transcend geographical boundaries to move across locations creating powerful global movements, impa...

Books are windows into experiences and as cultural conversations around gender identity and sexual orientation expand and multiply, they offer us lives and worlds to unpack the meaning of diversity. The fact that stultifying notions of what we can be and whom we can love are being increasingly challenged is a cause for celebration. However, this comes with a wide spectrum of responses, from bigotry and hate to confusion and anxiety. True to our philosophy here at Torchlight, we look to the bookshelf to deal with that. Happily, there is a rich and growing storehouse for those who ask questions for the purpose of educating themselves and others, those who seek resonance of their own lives or those who simply want their reading to encompass the world in all its diversity. So, as part of our t...

A library's collection is its heart and soul, the very foundation on which a library is built. It acts as a conduit for its community to learn about the world, see themselves reflected in it, contribute to a definition of themselves and engage with varied perspectives. The collection allows us to dream, to imagine, to enter worlds without going far. A library resides in its collection and so, we felt it was important to share a slice of our diverse collection with you. Why diverse? We live in a society that is diverse in every aspect, from language, religion, ethnicity, sexuality to beliefs, experiences and opinions. A library collection needs to reflect this diversity, in order for it to truly open up stories and lives from different lenses, realities and viewpoints. A diverse collectio...

As a young teen and adult, my relationship with books was almost sexual. There was an endless search – for something, not quite sure what. In pre-liberalisation India, in a pre-internet world, the search for a name for my feelings, the search for a rendition of those feelings was urgent and amorphous. At New Book Land, the circular bookshop in Janpath, I remember buying for ten rupees a book of short stories by an Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Soueif, and feeling thrilled by what I read. In the British Council library I borrowed two books, because one’s cover entranced me, full of fairy tale circus images, and the other’s name delighted me – Sexing The Cherry and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Walking on the street in New York, I bought for one dollar a copy of Bell Hooks’ Black Looks. I had no...

My bookshelf has looked the same for as long as I can remember. It goes from the floor up to the ceiling and is daffodil yellow in colour. It has been in my room since I started reading at the age of four. While books have been discarded and replaced over the years, the bookshelf has never been empty. The Magic Faraway Tree was a gift for my sixth birthday. One of our two copies of the Lord of the Rings made its way to my bookshelf soon after. Over the next year, my dad began reading a few pages out loud to me every night before I went to bed. Every so often, we could be heard pompously reciting, “In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie,” in gleeful unison. We eventually memorised the entire poem. I even wrote the clichéd “all that is gold does not glitter” poem on handmade ‘golden’ ...