Books, Buildings, Building Blocks: Evaluating the new Central Library

Even before the inauguration of the new location of Goa State Central Library, there was talk about it. Persons associated with the new building were giddy with excitement, asking in tones that communicated they did not wish criticism, ‘Don’t you think it is wonderful?’

This excitement however, has perhaps to do with all the wrong reasons. There is the almost childish excitement over all the gadgetry that has been employed in the new library building and the marveling at the contemporary styling involved in the façade-design of the building. This sort of adulation however may be missing the wood for the trees. The Central Library was already a formidable institution before it moved to its new location. Its stock of not just books, but multi-lingual newspapers from the days of Portuguese sovereignty over the territory, made it a place of pilgrimage for scholars from all across the world. The imaginations of many a contemporary adult were fired through the books made easily available at the Central Library. These are the fundamental treasures and assets of the Central Library, and happily these seem to have now been given a setting worthy of their value.

An earlier reflection in this column worried about the manner in which the Central Library was being displaced from the centre of the city to the margins of Panjim. Did this reflect on our priorities vis-à-vis knowledge and learning, that column had asked. Happily, it turns out that with the attention that has been lavished on the library building, such fears could be for the moment put aside. Indeed, given the manner that provisions in the new building seem to intersect with plans for State libraries outside of the Panjim, it may well turn out that the shifting of the library to the margin of the city, was not a shifting from the centre to the periphery of our attention, but a shifting to reach out to the often ignored peripheries of our State. If the new library with all its gadgetry can respond to the intellectual demands of locations outside Panjim, the shift would have been well worth it.

There is a grave danger to the library however when the focus on the new building is placed on its gadgetry. There is a peculiar Indian fascination for gadgets. Once obtained, and the status value the gadgets promise is achieved, we conveniently forget about them, and they rust or dust to death. We ought to be careful therefore where we place our emphasis when evaluating the new infrastructure of the Central Library. As mentioned above, our emphasis on the library must focus primarily on its intellectual resources. However, there is also another resource that power the earlier incarnation of the Central Library, and continues in the new, its human resources. Anyone who has used the Central Library, both old and new, will comment on the staff of the institution, who as a rule over-extend themselves to address the regular users of the library. There ofcourse the usual annoyances, when the librarians who ought to preside over the silence in the library, are often at the root of the cacophony that can preside even on the research floors of the library. Or the stray occasions, when students timidly entering onto the research areas, are given a tongue-lashing that may probably scar them away from research for the rest of their life. Despite these regular incidents however, as a rule, the staff will go out of their way to help. This has been a standard feature of the library, and happily the augmentation of the staff, seems to have not changed this fact. To forget the human resources of the library in a provincial fascination for technology would be the single largest mistake with which to inaugurate the new location of the Central Library.

Prasad Lolayekar & Carlos Fernandes

What should perhaps also be recognized however, is that in addition to the regular staff of the Library, the Central Library is currently blessed not only with an extremely hospitable, ever-listening, and eager-to-please Curator in the form of Carlos Fernandes, but his energies are supplemented by the innovative and visionary energies of the Director of Art and Culture  Prasad Lolayekar. We should consider ourselves blessed to have them at the helm of affairs. It appears that as a result of the synergies of these two men, and the countless others they have consulted with, and the fact of consultation should not be lightly dismissed, the Central Library is poised to reach out to ever diverse segments of the Goan population.

One other significant manner in which the Central Library has been augmented, is the inclusion of conference halls, gallery space and theatre halls within its design. The conference halls are an appropriate addition to a location that is not merely a lending library but a significant research destination. Hopefully, this new addition, will allow the Central Library to highlight its holdings, encourage a deeper engagement with these texts, and who knows, engage in the publication of the discussions and conferences held around these texts? Before all of that is done however, one hopes that the newspapers in various languages, that are rapidly disintegrating, will be speedily converted into digital format. We have waited for years now, for this critical and long-delayed action to be effected, and this action should now be undertaken post-haste, without further delay.

If the emphasis of this comment on the new location of the Central Library has focused on the human resources of the institution, then there is one last comment that needs to be made. In keeping with the general sentiment of awe and wonder with which the new location has been approached, there have been visitations organized for a variety of groups, ranging from noisy students from primary schools, to disinterested civil servants, and softly cooing visiting notables. If we are serious about the Central Library reaching out to ever larger segments of users (and we should bear in mind that this library is not merely a local treasure, but in fact an internationally significant resource centre), then there is an ever greater need to engage in some disciplinary actions with regard to our interface with the Library. A library is not a show-case object that can be viewed and appreciated. It is an object whose value and faults emerge in the course of daily and repeated use. Rather than merely the walk through the park introductions that are being given to young students therefore, perhaps there should be a focus on initiating these younger students into the cult of silent and patient pouring over the texts (now happily extended from print, into visual and audio-visual) that this institution holds. Indeed, in the long run, it is from the bowed and patient heads from inside the library that the most useful critiques of our new library building will emerge. From the moment, and from the outside, it appears that not enough is being done to encourage this aspect of the library’s objective. This objective can however, be achieved only through a more systematic, and long-term interaction between the Central Library and the various higher-secondary schools and colleges that send their students to the library. This objective will require the already pleasant staff, to develop other skills; and it will require the Central Library to develop nodes in other parts of the State, not limiting itself to the larger towns of the territory.

To focus on the technological additions to the Central Library, without appreciating its other assets would be to seriously miss the point of the new location to the institution. The new location of such a venerable institution offers Goan society a new start of sorts, a start which no doubt has its short-comings, but a start for which we should be grateful, and one we should seize to reimagine and rework our society. For those who were responsible for all of this till date, a big thank you.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times dtd 2 May 2012)

The Frustration of José Felipe: A Fable for our confused and frustrated times

For those of us who grew up English-speaking in Goa, feeding on a rich diet of Enid Blytons - so thoughtfully collected by the Central Library in Panjim - created a strange understanding of our ‘Goan’ world. Take for example the anecdote provided by my friend José Felipe. Brought up in Vasco, the family had an ancestral home in Sinquerim that they would travel to on holidays and in the summer. In the early 80’s, with or without the Mandovi Bridge, the trip was nothing less than an expedition. José Felipe was an avowed Enid Blyton buff. Sometime through the trip, Zé who was sitting squished between his two sisters in the back seat of their Fiat car, and hanging onto the back-rest of the front seat, couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been looking right and left for a while now, and unable able to control his excitement any longer, now piped up; “Ma, when are we going to see the natives?”

Recounting this anecdote always has us in splits, and poor Zé is never going to be allowed to forget this innocent gaffe. But ofcourse, the fault (if fault there is any) was not entirely his. We are what we read, what we see, and what we are led to believe. Zé reading the Enid Blytons, was in his mind, the audience that Blyton was writing for, British school-going boys and girls. This transformation was not entirely difficult for Zé, since he shared with the protagonists of Blyton’s writing a certain class-status. Like The Famous Five, the Secret Seven, he too belonged to a certain kind of middle-class. Like these adventurous British youth, he too was able to go off for trips into the ‘countryside’, and like these youth, would also in time, encounter the natives of the strange tropical worlds he was going to encounter. Clearly, his home in Vasco was seen as the realm of the natural (and civilized?), while the space outside of this home (and town) was part of the great unknown, a place full of mystery to be explored and discovered.

I am now at a critical juncture of this little narrative. There are two possible ways that I could go down. The first would be to trot down the road that says ‘Medium of Instruction’. This road breaks up into two further paths. The first, is the route of incrimination. I will have to pile up slur, upon slur, castigating Zé and his parents, for bringing up a child so clearly out of sync with his environment. Such an upbringing, this path will dictate to me, is not to be encouraged. Being of similar background to Zé however, I am most loathe to go down this path. I would rather choose a path that takes me toward a destination that I am more familiar. One where I see Zé, grow up to be a fine member of his community, fulfilling all the demands that tradition makes on his, as well as innovating for the future. I would normally have chosen this route, one that embraces the persons we have become, encouraging us on toward further heights and glories. The former path is the path of eternal misery, where we would reach nowhere, eternally unsure of ourselves, so confused and seized with doubt, that we would achieve nothing.

I have a vague feeling however that the next few weeks and months will give us plenty opportunities to ramble down these paths and the countryside they pass through. For this opportunity we must unconditionally thank Agnelo Fernandes who has raised a critical issue that for too long has gone without debate. With this prophetic knowledge therefore, I choose to take this narrative down another path, one of the disappointment that Zé encountered when globalization finally threw itself upon Indian shores.

Raised with Enid Blyton, then subsequently with every manner of literature, local, regional, national and international (all brought to us via translation in English) he longed for the destruction of the material and the intellectual constraints of our provincial world. It was with an eye to this destruction that he initially welcomed globalization, and with joy in his heart strolled through the sea of wonders that globalization began to spit out. Larger, glitzier music stores, fancy-shmancy book-stores, where books were stacked as far as the eye could see, malls with marbled halls hosting food-courts and world cuisine.

A couple of years into the era of globalization however and resident in Bangalore, Zé realised that something was seriously amiss; globalization was not delivering the goodies he had been expecting. There were fancy malls, large and promising book-stores, food-courts and music stores alright, but the content we had been expecting was all wrong! Rather than giving us more than what the Central Library had already been delivering to us, he found that these book-stores sold less! Crude and entirely utilitarian self-help books rather than the more stimulating selections from the literature of the world. The music stores were definitely larger and equipped with gizmos that allowed you to sample your music before you bought it, but there something dreadfully, dreadfully wrong! The music store was full of Tamil and Kannada music, devotional music and the same old boring ‘English’ music, but where was a sampling of music from around the world? Where was the Arabic music, the Iranian pop, Latin sounds from America, the Korean ‘singing witch’? The food-courts were perhaps the biggest disappointment. If he expected a certain democratization of food, a release of haute-cuisine into the commonplace, he was made painfully aware that he was living in a fool’s paradise. There was to be no steak, no sushi, no hummus and kebob. On the contrary, there was to be all varieties of chicken, and an expulsion of beef and pork, while at the same time pushing ‘American’ foods.

Globalisation it appears conspired against José Felipe! It did not result in any expansion of the intellectual or the material boundaries of our world. What it resulted in, was the expansion of unlimited consumption. In this conquest, the forces of globalization co-opted the vernacular cultures to further consolidate this new culture of unbridled consumption. Thus we don’t see vernacular books in these pretty new stores, the vernacular is used merely as a toy to rope in the innocents toward the altar of consumption. Everything is up for sale now, the innocence of those Blyton-educated days appearing no more than a dream, a possibility condemned to impotence.

In the course of the debate on the medium of instruction, perhaps this little fable of the rise and fall of the world of José Felipe has something to tell us. Rather than press home the interpretive advantage that is normally the domain of the polemicist, I’ll leave the options of this fable to you, gentle reader…

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 15 July 2009)