“We began to produce textbooks in Braille, for students up to the tenth standard. Then we realised that college students would need textbooks too, but they would be too large and too many to produce, since it is an expensive process,” says Raman Shankar, who heads the Braille Centre and the library at NAB. “That’s when we decided to begin recording books, and we started the Talking Book Centre in 1966.”
The library has 25 readers who lend their time to record books, of which nearly 50 per cent are volunteers while the rest are professionals. “Readers must have it in them to depict different scenes in the book so that the person listening will be able to imagine all of it,” says Shweta Pandya, a professional who has been working with the organisation for the past 20 years.
Pandya is one of the many professional readers who works for a humble Rs 180 per hour, and has recorded approximately 700900 audio books.
The recordings themselves are no mean feat. They involve reading continuously for hours at a stretch, and voice quality and expressions are of utmost importance. Recordings take place in three studios simultaneously, 15 hours a day. The small, but efficient, force at the NAB comprises a number of committed people, like recording engineer S C Sawant, who has been manning the sound production for nearly 41 years.
“Since technology is pro gressing, we have to keep up.
So, from a MACH 1 machine, we switched to spool cassettes and then to audio tapes in the nineties. Now we will be con verting everything into the digital format with the help of DAISY (Digitally Accessible Information System),” says Shankar.
The internationally accepted software will be easy to navigate, and visually challenged listeners will have an easier time stopping and starting the recordings based on the chapter, section and page of their choice.
The library itself is efficiently catalogued, and the only prerequisite for its use is that the person must be visually challenged and must produce a certificate proving this.
Librarian Jane Stephen, who has been with the NAB for 14 years now, says that at least 150 subscriptions go by post each day and at least 125 audio books are lent each day. For a deposit of Rs 30 per audio book and a lifetime membership of Rs 500, listeners can choose from a variety of books, textbooks and world literature.
While the audio books are used by other NGOs like Happy Home and School for the Blind, the NAB takes care not to allow other institutions to use them for fear that the visually challenged will lose out to sighted people who make use of the books. “We cannot be sure that institutions will give out the books to only the blind, so it would be unfair if someone else got hold of them,” says Shankar.
It’s easy to see why everyone looks up to Shankar, and why the NAB’s M P Shah Library is an example in itself. “Sometimes I think I am more privileged to have the opportunity to have access to these books because I have had the chance to read some of the best literature in the world,” he says with a smile.
URL: http://epaper.indianexpress.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=09_06_2008_523_005&typ=1&pub=320