The problem of plenty…….Paromita Vohra
As a child, one of my grandmother’s nicknames for me was chavvani chor because I regularly stole four annas in five and ten paise coins from her “chillar tray.” This wasn’t to buy ber, the consumer item of choice in my school, but to double my borrowing power for comics from Sarvodaya, the neighbourhood lending library.
My ambition was to be a librarian when I grew up — how else to be saved from a life of crime? There must be some moral to the story that while I grew up to be an obscure filmmaker, Sarvodaya grew up to be a famous DVD library.
There was nothing lofty about the books at the average lending library, but there was an element of unpredictability — an accidental Asimov among the Nancy Drews might open up a whole new universe. From the corner library, I graduated to the slightly fungoid corridors of grown-ups’ libraries in airforce messes and vestigial colonial clubs, headrushed at the possibility of what treasure I might discover.
Discovery was followed by lush absorption, laced with anticipation of other books I would get on returning these. I’d borrow books I loved over and over until I could finally buy my own.
Perhaps this is just the nostalgia of a pre-liberalisation generation. Not only could I and most of my friends not afford to buy too many books but there really weren’t that many bookstores from which to buy books. It was a wartime romance of scarcity.
As a post-liberalisation grown-up though, I do find myself with a peculiar library predicament, shared, I know, by many. Libraries may be vanishing, but I can sort of have my own by buying many books at all those bookshops and their sales.
Then, they lie in precarious piles, temptresses losing their nerve, waiting to catch my fancy, should I feel like sampling one of the pleasures at my disposal. Except I don’t — because they’re always there.
The discussion resulting from this is always — books must go electronic. Then we can have all the books we want without killing trees. Aside from the fact that electronic devices are not without environmental impact, I’m not sure how this might change the relationship with reading.
Because it feels as if we’re surrounded by a machinery of readings, literary festivals and reviewing or promotion of certain cooler or “A-list” books that dominate public awareness and subtly shape that rather private act: the development of personal taste.
I do worry that like movies and music in India, books might be becoming more things you feel you must buy than things you love — and that we might all be required to buy the same fair, virgin, convent educated books.
I believe people should buy books, films or music for these arts to thrive, but not through the bullying of marketing machinery on steroids. The library represents the idea that you can discover and choose what you connect with personally.
It allows you to chance the borrowing of a dud, unlike the rather decisive act of purchase and its unsaid need for consumer satisfaction.
So I’ve been feeling a bit hopeful since Kapil Sibal suggested a policy for neighbourhood libraries and reading rooms, a little pleased at the new online libraries like Friends of Books and Leaping Windows.
How else might we be granted the serendipity to move on from Chetan Bhagat to Kiran Nagarkar and from there to Vijaydan Detha, from the naive pleasures of the corner library to the sophisticated cornucopia of The Asiatic? It’s only through the possibility of chance encounters that such love stories can happen.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company.