How I fell in love with a library, and wrote a book about it
Libraries are
still very low on our list of national priorities. Who really goes to
libraries? We need to fix it so that everyone—young or old—may want to.
n the summer
of 2012, I met a man I consider to be one of India’s bravest. This man,
Madhukar Rao, was not a soldier at our borders or a sportsman aiming for gold.
He was an unremarkable, greying librarian in charge of the Hardayal Municipal
Library near New Delhi’s Rajiv Chowk. The Hardayal was founded in 1862, and it
showed every bit of its age. The building was dilapidated; the insect-ridden
books piled messily on shelves. There was no air conditioning, and the nearly
deserted 150-year-old reading room was like a furnace in the brutal Delhi
summer.
And yet,
inside were treasures. A 1676 edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the
World; a Persian version of the Mahabharata, written by a vizier of
Akbar; a Quran produced by Aurangzeb, and 16th century maps of London.
The library seemed tiny, but it had over 170,000 books in six languages.
Regards
Prof. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
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