29Mar 
2 Comments
2 Comments Writeups
3Feb 
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No Comments Kitabein Kuch Kehna Chahti Hain: Children & Books at Studio Safdar
For the last three and a half years, every Sunday without a single break, children from Shadi Khampur, Ranjit Nagar and Guru Nanak Nagar in West Delhi come to the Studio Safdar community library to read, to sing and play, to enter the world of books. Studio Safdar is an arts space, named after Safdar Hashmi (1954-1989), one of the founders of the theatre group Jana Natya Manch. Safdar was killed at the young age of 34, while performing a play in an industrial area on the outskirts of Delhi.
Studio Safdar was set up in 2012, to give concrete shape to Safdar’s dream of a space that would on the one hand be a resource for theatre persons to hold rehearsals and performances, and on the other to revitalize the cultural and artistic life of a local, underprivileged community.
Safdar himself wr...
3Feb 
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No Comments Fifteen Copies and Counting: Why Wuthering Heights Keeps Multiplying on My Shelf
Like most people in ishq waala love with books, I have amassed a loosely curated personal library over the years.
Illustration by Alia Sinha
My parents, like most newly upwardly mobile folk who want to give their children a better education than the one they received, made fine distinctions between useful and wasteful reading all throughout my school years. This meant that all off-the-syllabus fiction was looked at askance; only textbooks constituted serious reading. My school years were therefore spent hungering after books. The school library allowed only one book per week and even that privilege was taken away during exam months and board years; very few peers read so borrowing was out too, and Kindle and Nook and other handy e-readers were still a few years away.
I made the best of ...
1Feb 
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No Comments Preface to Issue 8
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 ...
1Feb 
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No Comments Bookshelf Travels: Borrowed Books in Personal Libraries
Lovleen Misra
जिस के पन्ने
क़ैद न करें
उसे क्या चुराना
जो दिमाग संग
दिल पे न छाए
उसे क्या चुराना
जो आपकी हमबिस्तर
न बन सके
उसे क्या चुराना
जो किताबी हवस
न जगाये
उसे क्या चुराना
जिसे लौटाने का
मन चाहे
उसे क्या चुराना.
जो अपने घर
पे अपनी न लगे
उसे क्या चुराना
जनाब, किताब
तेरी या मेरी नहीं
पढने वाली की होती है.
Translation
Why steal something
Whose pages fail to entrap you
Why steal something
That does not overwhelm the stone-heart
Why steal something
That cannot share your bed
Why steal something
That does not provoke a bookish lust
Why steal something
That you want to return
Why steal something
That does not feel at home in your home
Janab, a book is not mine or yours
It belongs to the reader
Roxanna Khan
I borrowed this book circa 2013 from a close ...
1Feb 
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No Comments On The Same Page
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.
Think libraries and one does think about rules, about silence. about overdue fines. Here, we look at libraries and rules, to see if there are rules we must keep but maybe - just maybe -there are a few that are quite unnecessary!
Cookie Monster in the Library - Really ?
The Library brings to mind books, but it also brings to mind rules. Here is how Mike Thaler imagines them in The Librarian From B...
26Jan 
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No Comments Screen, Paper, Stories!
I am not what can be called a careful reader. I love printed books—I live surrounded by them, and help create them. But I dogear my books, and leave them open which cracks the spine. I read in the shower, which causes the pages to curl up. I’d like all the books of a series to match, but this, I am not really hung up about.
What lingers for any book I read is the story within. This sounds really trite, I know, and while the pleasure from the physical book—the design and the feel of the paper and the weight of the cover—is very much there, these are pleasures I forget more quickly.
Reading for me is very private. I do recommend books, of course to friends, and those I really really like, on social media— may be one in three months—because I feel the world needs to read them. I do not revi...
26Jan 
1 Comment
1 Comment Rohith Vemula Library- The new face of revolution
Rohith Vemula, a young PhD scholar at Hyderabad University, committed suicide on January 17, 2016 prey to systemic oppression and institutionalised discrimination. His suicide triggered a new political wave throughout the country and brought to forefront the presence of caste, a reality rejected by many in the political space, and gave way to a movement bringing debates around caste to the centre stage. One result was the formation of Rohit Vemula Education Centre and Library in Phule Nagar, Powai, Mumbai.
One enters the lane of Phule Nagar, near IIT Market, a slum community, to see the houses clinging to each other as one, people sitting and standing around their front doors, dogs running and sleeping around, feeling best at home, children playing and bustling around, all signs of a com...
26Jan No Comments
No Comments Collections - Who is responsible?
“Librarians are turning to the police to recover borrowed books”
This was the headline in a national newspaper. The article went on to talk about how users in the public library treat borrowing as taking and that more than half the collection does not come back to the public library. We really need to pause to think about unreturned books. Does that constitute theft to necessitate police action? In what nature of relationships do we turn to the police? This really is the over riding question that we feel the library - the public library needs to consider.
Relationships are at the stronghold of public services, it is why institutions like the public library were imagined in the 18th Century. In India, it was in the Princely State of Baroda where Maharaj Sayajirao III Gaekwad introduced...
20Jan 
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No Comments This Book Need Not be Returned!
On Instagram, I find that Yamini Vijayan, editor of children’s books, has been chronicling community libraries from her travels. How many have you visited, and what are they like, I ask. “Oh so many,” she replies, “...libraries on islands, and libraries on top of hills. Libraries that are squeezed into biology labs. Libraries filled with bizarre religious and political texts. Sprawling libraries with not a soul in it. Tiny libraries that are exploding with readers. Grand libraries with grand bookshelves. Libraries in which books hang from strings tied to windows…”
Her desire to visit libraries on her travels began with mild curiosity but has become second nature now. “Often, when I find myself in libraries located in relatively conservative cultures, I’m shocked by the number of very, ve...
20Jan No Comments
No Comments 
20Jan 
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No Comments Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she calls herself a “wandering poet, though San Antonio, Texas is both home and the inspiration behind many of her poems. “But everywhere can be home the moment you unpack, make a tiny space that feels agreeable," says Nye. She was the recipient of the 2014 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. This poem is from the collection, Fuel.
Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things
She is holding the book close to her body,
carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,
down the tangled hill.
If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.
She looked hard among the long lines
of books to find this one.
When they start talking about money,
when the day contains such l...
22Oct 
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No Comments In Search of the Great Indian YA book
When I started working as the Kids editor at Time Out Mumbai, reviewing children’s books soon became one of the most exciting parts of my job. Suddenly my desk was groaning under copies of picture books, middle grade fiction and non-fiction and YA novels. A steady diet of Enid Blyton, and Archie and Tintin comics, it was like crawling through a musty cupboard and entering into a whole new world of literature.
I quickly became drawn to the Young Adult books, maybe because in some ways it was the easiest to transition to. What really also was interesting was that like JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, these books too had a crossover audience – being read by not only teenagers but also adults. The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, for instance, sent them in a frenzy of Team Jacob versus Te...
22Oct 
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No Comments They Touch Me in Ways My Smartphone Never Could: Teens on Their Relationship with Books
In his lecture, ‘Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming,’ Neil Gaiman says that “the simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.” As teachers of young people in urban India, this is our biggest challenge: to cultivate a love for reading in a generation that equates pleasure with instant gratification. Amidst a barrage of slick, easy-to-consume multimedia content, reading requires commitment and painstaking effort- the sort that adolescents grudgingly reserve for their examinations and other labour-intensive schoolwork.
The Harry Potter books have made an everlasting impact on my life. The idea of wizards, witches and Muggles gripped me right from the very first book. I ...
22Oct 
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No Comments Queering Goodreads and Other Adolescent Adventures
Hi, my name is Smita.
I want to tell you a little about why reading and books are important to me, and why they were particularly important to my adolescence. I’ve always had books around me while growing up. My dad loves reading and his books would be all over the house, and this was before I could even read.
When I started learning to read in LKG, I would pick up the books and riffle through them. My parents didn’t believe in saying things like certain books weren’t meant for kids. They believed that if you could read it and understand, it was well and good and you could go ahead.
Books are expensive in UAE, though, because they are all imported. When I was a little kid, we had a neighbour who was a teacher so she had a lot of kids' books and she gave them away to us so we could rea...
22Oct 
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No Comments Preface to Issue 7
Dear Torchlighters,
While it is true that most bookworms develop their reading habits in the golden summer of childhood, it is only during adolescence that they start coming into their own as readers. This is the time when read-alouds and dadi-nani stories give way to independent reading; when choice is exercised and genre preferences are formed; when the seeds of lifelong interests and obsessions are sown.
And thus, this issue.
In Spotlight, we present the stories of three people who traverse through the topography of their lives to reflect upon the bond between adolescence and books; sometimes this involves delving deep into their own pasts, other times it entails a reaching out to others. Editor and YA aficionado Bijal Vachharajani puts on her hiking boots In Search of the Great Indi...
22Oct 
1 Comment
1 Comment The Kids Are All Right: An Intergenerational Tale of Living and Loving YA Fiction
Two libraries were a big part of my tween years. The first was tidy, organised, and strictly monitored. It was roomy and bright with short wooden bookshelves, many of which were kept locked due to the apparent inappropriateness of the books they held. I visited it once a week during Library period, and more often than not, got into trouble with the librarian at my convent school in Chennai for talking too loudly and having a good time. The second — Senthil Lending Library near my parent’s home — was quite different. A narrow dark room, it had tall open steel bookshelves flanked by many a swirling dust ball. The stacking of the books was chaotic at best, but the librarian knew his way around. He was a nice sort, never bothered by noise as long as the books were returned on or before the due...
22Oct 
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No Comments “A Library For All”: Growing Up In A Faraway Land
It is hot and stuffy outside, and most locals are taking their afternoon naps. Inside a community library at Sheikh Sarai in New Delhi however, the world is wide awake.
This motley bunch is not the usual lot that fills the small library rooms on a working week. They look around curiously, navigating new vocabularies and unfamiliar faces. They browse through rows of books and converse amidst themselves in their mother tongues. Once a week, under the initiative of the UNHCR-BOSCO Refugee Assistance Programme, around fifty Afghan children, aged between six and thirteen, visit the library as members. Entirely volunteer-driven, The Community Library Project (TCLP) passionately advocates reading for pleasure and learning as it upholds everyone’s right to access good quality books.
An estimated...
22Oct 1 Comment
1 Comment Review: Siddhartha Sarma’s Year of the Weeds is Essential Reading in Our Troubled Democracy
One of the biggest challenges for English children’s literature in India is the representation of realities from the non-English speaking parts of our society. It has been a struggle unique to writers of English in India – the struggle to find a self-confident voice that writes in a language given to us by colonialism. Today, that extends to the struggle of using that voice to bring stories of other post-colonial inequities - from villages and working class urban settlements, from forests and tribal lands. How can these mediated stories reflect realities that are so different from that of the readers of those books? And why should these realities matter to young adult readers?
Siddhartha Sarma’s new book, Year of the Weeds, answers this in an exemplary way. It is the story of Korok, a you...
22Oct 
2 Comments
2 Comments Bosom Buddies
Growing up in Toronto, Canada—as a recent immigrant with skin a different colour from my mostly white classmates and an accent still adjusting to new pronunciations—I always felt the difference between myself and everyone else.
For as long as I can remember, I was uncomfortable as a teen in my own skin and struggled with confidence issues. We had migrated from Dubai to Toronto when I was 5 years old, and the isolation of a new country was one of the reasons I withdrew into books and music early on. I became an avid reader and diary-keeper, and the versatility and character-building in books I read gave me hope that I would be OK as I was, no matter how uneasy or imperfect.
I believed in the power of friendship. It didn’t matter that my classmates would see me on the school bus and taunt ...