What are words worth?

The Tech Centre at the Boston Public Library The entry hall in Harvard's Widener Library I'm carded! A sampling of riches One of my favourite childhood memories of summer in Secunderabad was being able to go to the City Central Library branch near Clock Tower and borrow books, week after week. The selection of children's books must have been minuscule compared to the wide range available today, and Young Adult was a category yet to be invented, but even so, I was happy enough with the rows of mystery books and school stories and the odd Ruskin Bond, all covered in an indestructible green rexine. And the library was a reasonably friendly space--at least that's how I remember it. Apart from this, if we wanted books, and if our parents could afford it, you went to Kadambi Bookstores or the small but busy Sri Rama Book Depot and picked up the latest Enid Blyton for Rs 2.50 or a Children's Book Trust publication for a couple of rupees. And there were ...

We had just been let off by the taxi at the corner of the block in the Prezelauer district of Berlin where my friend Elfriede lives. Dragging our 20-kilo loads along, my daughter and I trudge along the street toward her house. I have my eyes on the sidewalk and almost bump into a tree trunk—and look up to find it’s not. In the roughly carved recesses of what was once a tree, are bookshelves, the books inside protected by curved glass that could be opened with a push. No locks and no latches. The books look well thumbed and put there by caring hands, not just discarded after a quick read. Later, Elfriede explains it to us. People in the neighbourhood drop off books they have read and would like to share.   Others pick them up, or just leaf through them while sitting at the café next door, sometimes leaving another book in exchange.   Charming idea. A lovely woman I meet at dinner later in the week tells me that if she finishes a book while she’s...

I tuned into NPR's Fresh Air this morning (do you 'tune in' on the internet?) and looked to the list of stories on the right panel to find one I had not listened to earlier--an interview with Maurice Sendak on the occasion of the publication of Bumble Ardy. It was a great interview, conducted graciously as always by Terry Gross of Fresh Air. The interview itself made me think about a variety of things....the artistic imagination, the world of the child, death, relationships, fear and the whole host of things we all deal with as human beings. After listening to the interview, I went back to the home page and noticed something I had missed earlier--a special Fresh Air show dedicated to Sendak, on his death, just yesterday (May 8). The show features excerpts from several interviews with the children's author and illustrator, and reminiscences by other writers and journalists. From then on it was a short journey to discover the several other tributes paid in newspapers ac...

When you visit a place that has occupied your imagination in different ways, your experience is continually overlaid by the made-up pictures that you hold in your head, and you can't get away from a feeling of second sight. Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Garden introduced me to Colombo through an evocative and heart-breaking story, its events and people set in a lovingly described landscape that took me through the streets of the city and the roads of the countryside in ways my physical travels will perhaps never surpass. So my all-too-brief visit to this city was spent looking around the corner for places I had already been to in the novel. Other stories of course have also contributed to my imagined geography in less pleasant ways: news reports of the 26 years of conflict, the Channel 4 documentary that gave the term Killing Fields a different temporal and spatial setting, the UNHRC petition against Sri Lanka, Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and so much else. And then of c...

There's a half read book in the seat pocket in my car: Andra Levy's "Long Song". There's a volume by Tehmina Aman gathering dust next to the bed. And there's a third, dust-jacket-covered, few-times-opened copy of Philip Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" on my desk. All this quite apart from the many bought-and-waiting-to-be-read books on the shelves, pushed further back each time I go to the bookstore and emerge defeated, two more under my arm. I'm sure many of us have experienced this space between stories, the hiatus between books. You finish one, are overwhelmed by the craft of the writer and the sweep of the story, and wallow in the imagination of a brilliant writer, wondering if it will be surpassed, and knowing full well it will. There are many others awaiting your attention but you feel reluctant to break this spell, to enter into yet another world that has been painstakingly built for your occupation. Weeks go by and you...

After months of wanting to get out there on a Sunday morning and scrounge around the street bazaar for more books to stuff into my already bursting-at-the-margins shelves, we finally made it! Three regulars and one newcomer from our three-month old Book Club met on a Sunday morning, bright and early (well...tennish) near St George's Grammar School (remember those grey school tunics?) and set off to stare at the books on the footpath. The first few displays we came across, just past the Taj Mahal hotel (we could already smell the dosas we had promised ourselves), were not very inspiring, despite snazzy titles and lurid pictures of women in sixties' hairdos on the cover. One title in particular caught my eye: "The curse of the singles table: A true story of 1001 nights without sex" by Suzanne Schlossberg. Intriguing, that, and perhaps nothing like Sheherezade's tales spanning a similar period! Gouri was the first to spot something she liked, and before we knew it...

I'm just back from an hour talking about something I find it difficult to stop talking about, with four others who appear to be somewhat similarly inclined. Not a crowd by any standards, but a group that represents a beginning. The idea to start a book club has been brewing for a while now; every time I find myself in conversation with someone about a book I've read, or a friend asks me to recommend reading for a child with a voracious appetite for the printed word, I can feel a certain excitement about words and the ways in which they turn into stories, offering windows into lives of others, worlds that I would never have access to without the channel created by imagination. Oftentimes these conversations have ended with the suggestion that we should start a book club. After many months of prevarication and a bit of a push from a young friend, it finally happened, and that's how I found myself in the brightly painted library of Little People Tree with four others, talking...

Three books, a dozen teachers, two expert voices, and a brightly painted room. The result was an hour of reflection and enjoyment, an escape into a space we had forgotten existed. Our own pleasure in the magic woven by words, the ability to travel into experiences not our own, and the possibility of discovering empathies--if not answers--in these narratives. When we at Teacher Plus were wondering what we could do to make the day special for our own community of teachers, we hit upon the idea of a session where teachers would turn listeners--not for the purpose of taking ideas back into their classrooms but to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to a good story. The books we chose were simple, easy to obtain volumes that told stories that, despite their varied setting, were universal in the themes they addressed: boisterous classrooms, distracted students, difficult teenagers, and the never quite defined aims of education. But these themes were not wrapped in polemic or a...

As I scanned my bookshelf and ticked off in my mind the books I had finished reading, it struck me that works in translation comprised about 80 percent of my list last year. I don't consciously look for translated work, other than those by writers in Indian languages (being handicapped by my relative inability to fully appreciate the written word in the Indian languages I am familiar with) but it turns out that many of the non-Indian writers I had read last year were also in translation. Allowing works of imagination (and information of course) to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries leads to a wonderful movement of ideas, creating connections in a relatively effortless manner. Of course, I completely appreciate that the act of translation is certainly not without effort, in fact requires a special talent that is able to transfer mood and meaning to an alien language in a way that leaves no sense of a "foreign tongue" in a reader's head. The best translati...

A couple of weeks ago I came home from a book launch with a nice fat hardbound copy of the novel, Amitav Ghosh's "River of Smoke", signed by the author with an inscription to my daughter. This copy joined my set of three of Ghosh's books, each with a signature and a personal note. Then there's the signed copy of Chimamanda Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" alongside Alexander McCall Smith's "No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" with his name scrawled on the fly-leaf. Other authors have scrawled their unrecognizable or distinctive black-ink John Hancocks on other books, from Mark Tully to William Dalrymple to Kaveri Nambisan. Each of the inscriptions brings back a story of a meeting, of a specific context of experiencing the book. And I treasure them all. I know, ten or twenty years from now, when my bibliophile daughter takes over my bookshelves, she will feel the same fondness for those old volumes, maybe a bit yellowed and dog-eared, bu...

If you haven't read Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar's thought provoking and hugely successful book, The Art of Choosing , then I would highly recommend it (if you're into non-fiction trendspotting books), Of course I speak only from the experience of having read a good review in nothing less than the New York Times and having watched a TED Talk. But the review, combined with an interview of the charming woman, made the book sound very promising...and soon enough, it seems to reached the front display in Indian bookstores as well. But this was not what I was looking for as I browsed my way through a Landmark store this afternoon. I was in search of the perfect gift for a friend who is currently into Indian writing in English.  No dearth of books in this genre, you would think, rightly, in fact a plethora of choices. What used to be a short dusty shelf of books by a handful of authors has now grown to an entire section in the bookstore, with women writers domin...

One of the advantages of being driven is that I have more time to read. Now, having earlier been torn between giving up control of the wheel and having a little more time to think, stare out the window and actually see what is going on instead of being disturbed by the aggressive hoardings that have colonised our skyline,  I find that the time gained has its uses. Significantly, I am catching up on my reading. This serves two purposes. One, instead of getting tense and irritable over what seems to me like reckless driving, I distract myself with a book or newspaper. Two, I am able to read uninterruptedly, and the time I have at my disposal is increasing by the day, as the Hyderabad traffic reaches new levels of congestion. I've taken to leaving a couple of books in the car--just in case--apart from carrying one in my bag. The one I carry in my bag is the more serious, long-haul book, while those left in the car tend to be the "dip into" variety or non-fiction that can b...

I’ve just finished my second Ian McEwan book in a row, and my fifth overall. I’m sure this happens with many of us, that we find ourselves caught up with a writer we enjoy and whose work engages us in a deep, intimate way, and we are loath to leave. We immerse ourselves in book after book and just do not want to part company. The book I just finished is “Black Dogs” and the one just before was “Enduring Love”. For anyone who has read Ian McEwan, you would sense a certain comforting sameness across his writing—not a boring, tedious sameness, but a common thread of deeply felt humanity (and perhaps many writers have this) that is at once despairing and hopeful. There’s a recognition of a core of evil and ugliness that runs through all individuals, and it is in overcoming this or confronting it with the goodness that also runs through us that a story emerges. It’s also the specificity with which large-scale events affect each one of us, and changes our lives, forever. Take, for instan...