In my first visit to library of my college in Ahmedabad I found that books were kept in locked steel cupboards with glass doors. I requested the assistant to open the cupboards. The library assistant told me to first select books from catalogue only then would he open the cupboard in which books were placed. I wanted to browse subject related books before deciding the ones I would borrow. Citing a college regulation the library assistant refused my request. I left the library. I spoke to a lecturer about the situation. He advised me to buy the prescribed text book as these would help me to do well in the examination. I had seen text books. They were dull and in some cases contained mistakes. I was doing bachelor of commerce degree in early 1980s.
My college was near Gujarat Vidyapith that Mahatma Gandhi had founded in 1920. The library of Gujarat Vidyapith is open to local community. It is one of the best libraries I have seen in India. It has over 6,50,000 books; that is one book for about nine residents of Ahmedabad. While we are on numbers two other numbers must be mentioned. The library remains open 364 days of the year. Only on first day of Hindu Calendar Vikram (Bikram) Samvat it is closed. Vikram Samvat year started about 56.7 years before Gregorian calendar. Currently therefore, it is Vikram Samvat 2074 which will change to Vikram Samvat 2075 on 18 March 2018. Nepal uses Vikram Samvat as national calendar.
The other number is 1,619. According to the library’s website it had 1,619 active members in 2016-17. I remember paying annual membership fee that was smaller than the cost of watching couple of movies in morning shows in the cinemas near our college which we occasionally did when classes became unbearable. A good library fuels imagination and sense of discovery. What then explains such a small active membership at Vidyapith library in the centre of city with population of over five million? Is it to do with the archaic regulations in school and college libraries? Is it untrained library staff? Is it the education system with over reliance on prescribed poorly written text books, assessment and obsession with ranks that douses burning imagination of young people before they discover the joy of interdisciplinary knowledge? Or is it colonisation of mind space by inane chats on social media and dreadful combination of audio-visual media entrapments? It is perhaps all of these that explain why a treasure house like Gujarat Vidyapith library does not have many active members. Thanks to the poor imagination of my college authorities and tinted views about purpose of library that the library assistant and my college lecturer shared, I discovered a better library.
The general reading hall with high ceiling welcomes visitor before she reaches information desk in the centre of library. I always felt humbled in presence of ocean of knowledge inside library which was furnished simply but was fit for serious studies with sitting capacity for 350 people. Large windows let natural light in. There were many trees surrounding the library. Screaming peacocks in gardens of Vidyapith would occasionally break the silence in library. The book shelves were open and at accessible height.
One day with no particular title in mind I was browsing philosophy section when I found a book titled The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. In the book Heilbroner sketched intellectual biographies and contributions of great thinkers we have come to call economists. The thinkers included Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter. Reading of the book was a serendipitous encounter with economics in philosophy section of the library. Veblen’s unconventional approach to explaining consumption choices by mixing sociological and anthropological interpretations of human choice struck a chord inside me. I realised that individual’s economic behaviour could not be understood through diagrams of marginal utility curves only and India’s economic development through study of five year socialist plans that we were being taught in the college.
The open access libraries are in tune with wandering human mind. We get about 4,000 thoughts in a day according to a scientific study Daydreaming and fantasizing: Thought flow and motivation by Professor Eric Klinger. Average length of thoughts is about 14 seconds. Nearly half of these thoughts are wandering mind’s undirected thinking that Eric Klinger calls ‘day dreaming’. Letting mind wander may facilitate creative problem solving argued Benjamin Baird and others in Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. While libraries organise the books and journals systematically, carefully designed open access libraries allow a curious visitor to wander among company of great writers sitting on shelves always ready to shake hands and take an intellectual walk with readers.
References:
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M.D., Kam, J.W., Franklin, M.S. and Schooler, J.W., 2012. Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), pp.1117-1122.
Klinger, E. 2009. Daydreaming and fantasizing: Thought flow and motivation. In K. D. Markman, W. M. P. Klein, & J. A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of imagination and mental simulation (pp. 225-239). New York: Psychology Press.
Very true. Very important information for us.��
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