Found: There's No Place Like Rome.
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I have a holiday in Rome coming up, so I'm sharing all the places I can't
wait to see, shop, and, of course, eat. My annotated map included!
11
This takes Mammoth Amount of Courage and Shameless-ness to confess that it was Only A Month or So Back that I Visited and Used a Public Library for the First Time, or any Library if you don’t count in The Horror of a Library that Our School (the Honourable K.V.) Library was. Coming to think of it, My First School's Library, a Private One, fared so much Better than the Centrally Backed One.
Coming back to The Point, I Never Before had to use any Library. I always Believed that you must Own the Books you Read or which you Thought you Would have Read, which has been The Case for Me Quite a Lot of Times. The Sight of Books does Wonder to My Body that even Mallika Sherawat fails to Do. The Breathing Increases so does The Heart Beat. The Brain Rejects to Process Any Other Stimuli. The Smell, Texture and the Sound of Turning a Page reign Supreme.
The Idea to Join The Library near My Place (Truth be Told, that’s The Only One in This Goddamned Place) occurred when I read that it was being 'Revived' again. Once it was One of The Best District Libraries of The Region, until Governmental Complacency became The Reason it turned into The Perfect Bollywood styled Bhoot Bangla. An Indoor Auditorium just Next to It kept It from being Totally Neglected and It got its Regular Painting Sessions. But it Was Rotting from Inside. Literally.
The Library is within 1 Minutes Distance from where I Haunt, and Since Curiosity had already Killed The Cat, I wasn't Left Out Too. A Short Visit there Insured Me a Form and Within a Week I got My Very Own Green Leather Looking Plastic Covered Tiny Library Card.
As I entered The Library, The Middle Aged Male Librarian looked up from Gossiping with His Female Counterpart.
"Card ase?"
"Hein."
As None of My Non-English Languages Reading Skills(read: Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit and to a little extent, Assamese) are Even Passable, I asked for The English Language Section. Without a Proper Answer or even a Crude Gesture towards the site, he began Inquiring Me of Exactly what Type of Book I wanted.
He Stared Me for A Second, and Then Rushed off Behind Some Shelf. I mentally Wished He Was Suffering from Some Bad Mid-Life Crisis.
"Here."
I followed His Voice, and there He was, Guarding a Whole Lot of Books. English Books.
Old English Books.
"Here."
He pointed towards Them.
For A While, I Dreaded The Thought That He was going to Stay and Ask me now Exactly Which Book I wanted (I even had An Answer Ready; Kama Sutra, just To Piss Him), Hand That To Me and Then Throw Me Out of His Long Forgotten Abode, Whose Tranquine Desertedness I had come to Disturb. But he Left. Thank You Very Much.
The Library allows Its Members to Borrow 2 Books At A Time for 15 Days. It was Build Decades Ago, When India Was Another Western-World-Perceived-About-To-Disintegrate-Huge-Socialist-State. It Reflected The Dead Ordinariness of the 60s and 70s Indian Socialism. Basic Wooden Shelves With Moth Eaten Leather Bound Books. And as Expected, I was The Only One Browsing through Them.
My Spying Skills (the Date Label stuck Inside to be More Precise) told me that Readers were/are Scare for This Library. How To Kill A Mockingbird had it Being Issued Last during The Later 80s. Umrao Jaan Adah in 1992. Wuthering Heights in 1999. And Twilight In Delhi in 2001.
Most to All Readers of This Sleepy Town buy Their Own Books. Or to a Lesser Degree, Borrow from Someone Else. But never from a Library. That The Local Library has Masterpieces Rotting inside Escapes Everyone's Attention. The Fact that Russia was once India’s Big Bro is Quiet Apparent. A Majority of The Books has been Penned by The Russian Masters. Tolstoy, Gogol et al. Second came The Native Indians, The Curry Eating Ones (Khushwant Singh, Mukul Kesavan), then the English (The Bronte Sisters, Austen) and then the rest.
The Collection It has is Vast. I didn’t Expect The Latest of The Books, and neither didn it Deserve the Expectation too, though, it did have the odd Jhumpa Lahiri, Aravind Adiga, William Dalrymple and more. Moreover, the Collection in The Reading Room was Much Better. Though it didn’t Allow those Books to be Issued, nevertheless, I found a New Corner to burn My Time going over TheArt of Vogue Covers 1909-1940 or The one on Mughal Architecture. Bliss.
To give The Library and The ‘Reviving Committee’ its due, Yes, Things are Looking Up. Books are Categorised, and Actually kept According to Genre! I wasn't even Allowed to enter the Reading Room when I First visited The Library as it was Experiencing Its First 'Maintenance Works' in Decades. A Trust from Calcutta named after Raja Ram Mohan Roy had Donated Several Books, both New and (mostly) Old Titles, to its Kitty too. The Library was to get A New Website soon too. And Every Thing has been Computerised.
Seeing such Marvels go to Waste, I contemplated to Nick a Few Away. Atleast They would be Read and Valued, kept Properly inside Glass Shelves. As My Immoral Plans were taking Shape, I gave the Female Mid-Aged Librarian My Selected Copy of Twilight In Delhi by Ahmed Ali(sudden remembrance of another Blogger's Blog had made me pick it up).
(since then, The Blogger has Nicked one.)
She took My Card away and gave Me the Ownership of The Book for The Next Half Month. As I left The Library, I opened The Book and The Smell, hinting it being Opened Again in A Long Time, hit My Olfactory Glands. My Eyes fell on A Random Verse in The Book( it's Filled with Them):
I’m the light of no one’s eye,
The rest of no one’s heart am I.
That which can be of use to none
-Just a handful of dust am I.
Bahadur Shah Zafar
The Library Seemed to Say The Same.
***
One of My Wishes listed in My Previously Posted Bucket List came Partially True. The Delhi High Court, after Some Nudges from The Supreme Court, has Finally given Its Verdict that rules Homosexual Acts Between Two Consenting Adults in Private as Being Completely Legal. It’s just Not An Act of Giving A Repressed Minority Community its Basic Human Rights, but It also Denotes That Our Country Is Changing. And This Time for The Better.
It Proves that Our Judiciary is Not a Weak, Corrupted, Outdated Institution. Its One of The Few Times in The Very Recent Times, when I felt Obsessively Proud to be An Indian, and The Only Time when It regarded Withholding Human Rights.
The Claims of The Religious Groups that it is Against God, Nature and 'Indian Culture' are Extremely Funny at Their Best and Extremely Gut Pukingly Disgusting at Their Worst. A Baba Ramdev Admiring Friend of Mine recently Lost Her Admiration after The Baba made His 17thCentury Era Comments on Homosexuality. And No, She was Fully Straight.
How come Sex between Two Consenting Adults Harm God? Hey! If God weren’t So Imaginative in That Department, then Gays wouldn't have Existed in The First Place. They Really didn't Come Along with Jadoo, We All Know That.
And Nature is Still Largely Unexplored that Making Claims like XYZ is Against Nature is Not Only Whole-ly Wrong, but Expresses The Person's Pea-Sized Understanding about The Very Nature They seem To be are Guarding.
And those Godsend Protectors of Indian Culture should First take a Crash Course in Ancient Indian Culture, Starting with a Field Trip to Khajuraho and then a Quick Look through Kama Sutra. When Ancient Temples, Scriptures and Mythology are Filled with LGBT References, then Which 'Indian Culture' are They Defending?
Do We even have a Composite 'Indian Culture' to Begin with? Such Questions Always remain Unanswered by the Moral Police in This Nation, and People Continue to Oppress and Be Oppressed.
-:Finite:-
