Library

once thronged by students and bespectacled voracious readers, are now locked up and haunted. Some of these buildings have been razed to the ground so that promoters and syndicates can build a housing complex or a shopping mall. We cannot afford the luxury of nostalgia. For good or for bad, life will go on at its own pace without the culture of libraries that we grew up with. That does not necessarily mean that we have stopped reading. Besides, most of these local libraries were popular because of the cheap novels and magazines that they dished out to many housewives and college lovers, a clientele now taken over by TV soap operas in our drawing rooms.

But the typical 'feel' of an imposing well-stocked library still retains a special charm of its own. Huge carpet to ceiling book racks, the smell of rare old dusty books, rows of wooden benches and stiff chairs with silent men and women engrossed in reference books in the shadowy corners of a large hall under archaic noisy fans pull us back into a different era where unread books were unknown worlds waiting to be explored. A familiar library was a temple for book lovers.

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In Maramia, Our library in Maramia is still a work in progress. It is not a comprehensive library that aims to compete with traditional ones but we are trying make a collection of the type of subjects and books we prefer. We maintain two separate sections for Bengali and English titles with books on diverse subjects ranging from the the Upanishads to Harry Potter. Our emphasis is more on spiritual literature and less on standard scriptures, more on science and less on hearsay, more on lifestyle and less on doctrines. Often, when we come across an interesting book, we read it out to each other, discuss it, question it, interpret it and absorb it. Dynamic and shared reading keeps us alive, they provoke our thoughts and our mind is nourished by a rich diet of ideas beside the main meals of extempore discussions on life.

We do not accept old torn and tattered books as donations from private collections. Many people want to clean up their spaces once occupied by their peers. Maybe the old man in the family has passed away. No one has any use for those old worn out books any more. They are like relics of a dead past. Donating them to an ashram library is like getting rid of trash. Even if some of those books are valuable we prefer the healthier modern versions. A book is not only a series of yellow pages where information is stored. It should feel pleasant and friendly in your hands, it should draw you in with its looks. Most of the time we try to buy the ones we want to keep in the library. We also buy and download ebooks in our devices so that our reading habits are not always restricted by place and time.

We try to keep pace with the explosion of audiovisual communication available to us. Information and experience that you can gather from ten books may be encapsulated in a brilliant forty-minute documentary on YouTube. We are creating a meticulous library of films and videos to inform and enrich ourselves. These include features, documentaries, biopics and videos on space exploration.

As part of our library-related activity we intend to maintain a wide collection of great music in our stocks. As with discussions, books and films we do not discriminate with our choices. We are open to all kinds of music, from the classical to the modern, from jazz to pop, from folk to film songs, from Indian to Caribbean, as long as they are worth listening to, as long as they add meaning and value to our tastes and rhythm in Maramia. Beside the presence of physical books the others do not require space and that is an advantage. Our concept of a multimedia library is primarily committed to mental, intellectual, emotional and spiritual stimulation.