THE STRANGER IN MY HOME
  • Home
  • Vignettes
    • Encounters
    • Events
    • Experiences
    • Epiphanies
  • Stories
  • Fables
  • Translations
  • Miscellany
  • Now/Then

now  /  then

blogs and blends

We Accomplished

6/28/2020

1 Comment

 
Every time I hear someone cite the Maimonedis adage “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” I feel like saying, “Better still, teach him to read and he can teach himself how to fish and do a thousand other things.” He can go on to YouTube and Coursera and a million illustrated books and learn how to speak Serbo-Croatian, play the harpsichord and cook a gourmet French dinner.
 
I am a fanatic on the subject of learning and, therefore, of reading. I came from a low-income middle-class family and knew that I needed to read and learn if I wanted to get anywhere. I developed a love for reading but discovered that books were hard to get in the city I lived in. Kolkata was painfully short of decent libraries.
 
The smartest idea I had was to start a library of our own. I was in high school and I talked with a classmate who too loved to read. We had already exchanged books: I had lent him the novels I had at home, two at a time, and he had reciprocated from his collection. Why didn’t we extend the scope, I told Prasanta, join with a bunch of our friends, pool all our books and start a library that all of us can use. We would have a much richer collection, which could get richer if we continued to expand the circle. Prasanta promised to think about it.
 
He did more. He returned the following week with a grander idea. Prasanta was from an affluent business family and lived in a large, three-story house. He said he had persuaded his father to let us have a room on the ground floor, free, for the purpose. This meant we had a place where scores of books could be safely kept, and several people could come and make use of the library.
 
We talked some more and expanded the idea. With space available, we could admit a larger number of members, not just our friends, but also some young people from the locality, which would help augment our collection. Further, we would institute a small monthly fee, which would help us buy more books to attract even more members.
 
The six pioneers gathered in the allotted room, cleaned it, put up shelves, added a few chairs, and started two folders with records of acquisitions and the daily transactions of books lent and returned. With modest fanfare, with cups of tea for all of us, a library started the following week.

We had to have a name and Prasanta suggested Sarat Pathagar, in honor of Saratchandra the novelist. Though second to none in my admiration of Saratchandra – rereading him thirty years later I still thought he was a master storyteller – I was averse to hero-worship and would have preferred a name that characterized our little library, but I went along with the general mood. I liked the literalness of Pathagar, a place to read.
Picture
​The place was a half-hour walk from my home and it became a place of both comfort and stimulation. I could browse through books, something I could not do in my school (or even later in my college or university), and leafed through widely varied books that excited me. We had started with the idea of stocking novels and short stories, but members donated other kinds of books that I found a source of excitement. Somebody donated an illustrated book on astronomy, which she was allowed to do instead of the membership fee for a month or two.
 
Very quickly, it also became a meeting place of friends, many of whom liked the idea of sitting and chatting surrounded by a mountain of books and a sense of purpose. The very place induced us to talk about books we had read or wanted to read. We talked about what the books meant to us. As we talked about what we liked and what we didn’t, we went deeper and deeper into the content of the books. I remember, as we talked about the novels of Saratchandra, we argued vigorously about the role of women and what social customs put cruel restraints on them. The library helped teach us what our schools sadly failed to make us aware.
 
Prasanta, who had ambitions to teach someday, told me, “As a child, I heard from others and felt myself that learning anything is an unpleasant chore. When I started reading the literature, I found the opposite: learning can be fun. School is seldom fun. A library is always fun.”
 
We were proud we had created a library that made it fun for others too. When we went to college, we handed over the charge to others, but the library continued. I felt I had accomplished something worthwhile.
 
In years, I went on to study a ‘dismal science’ in a well-known college, but my undying love of literature and analytical thinking was nurtured in a modest room in Prasanta’s home, in the company of earnest fellow travelers who cared about books and loved to talk about literature. And Prasanta, to the great discomfiture of his businessman father and businessmen brothers, defiantly went on to study literature in the same college and in time became a professor and wrote the most astounding authoritative biography of Rabindranath.
1 Comment
James Vollmer
6/28/2020 11:18:15

Book lovers all!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Manish Nandy

    Writer, Speaker, Consultant
    Earlier: Diplomat, Executive


    Archives

    January 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All

Proudly powered by Weebly
© Manish Nandy 2015  The Stranger in My Home