An Exit and A (Re)Entry
One way in which I have come to know myself better is in the way others refer to me. All qualities that refer to me have been rather grace filled and compel me to live a better life to examine more closely my actions and intentions and to try and live upto them. Some of […]
Learnings from Displays
As a part of our mentoring support to a sister organisation, Prayog in Bihar, Nayan, Anandita and I found ourselves in Gopalganj Dt. of Bihar on a pleasant week in December 2020. The world of the pandemic and social distancing was cast aside to keep the glow of library possibilities alive. One of the requests […]
Six Book Relay Teams – One Book
A key element of library work is that of interaction. Texts are read, shared, discussed, dismissed, awaited as children in our pre COVID libraries gathered at regular intervals on our shared journey of becoming readers. This interruption in our social lives simply meant we had to think again. As is want to happen when intentions […]
Story Hour from Home
In a book titled Reader Come Home by neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, we are cautioned to not expose children younger than five years to screens. The book is presented with thoughtfully documented science of the brain that shows us how our circuitry is changing with digital reading. Wolf advocates biliteracy, teaching young children “to read physical […]
The Underworld of our Virtual Work Life
The clock reads 17 minutes to scheduled zoom session My heart reads […]
Are the Children Alright? Am I?
I was locked down for over six weeks in a home with no children. As I looked out onto the road, I would see a man on a bike, a woman on a bike, an occasional car driven by a woman or more often a man,but I never saw a child. I was beginning to miss the […]
Seeking Blessings
I, word lover that I am have been hanging onto words like ‘mantras’ that must be chanted appropriately for units of time inorder to be heard. This will pass. It will not affect our work. Our vision is stronger than this time. How can libraries be irrelevant ? The children will return to us. We […]
Tomie dePaola and the Joy his stories brought
Unknown to us at the time, as Tomie dePaola passed away on the 30th of March 2020, amongst the Bookworm team, we were all reading and preparing for a book discussion on The Clown of God, one of our more charged and purposeful discussions of 2020. We read Nana Upstairs Nana Downstairs to hundreds of school children every […]
Stories Connect Us
Social distancing in the library has resulted in empty library rooms, forlorn passages, a quiet hall and the depressing realisation that my day is empty without the children. I am struck by how much of my thinking and doing is because of the interactions that children and adults bring into my library work and just […]
I Remember the Stories
No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it. These are the first two lines of a poem by Dorianne Laux titled ‘For the Sake of Strangers’. I retrieve those lines here and more in this post as I attempt to share a rather singular story that emerged out […]