Date: 10 September 2010
The Delhi Urban Platform invites you
to a discussion on
Libraries and the City
6 pm, 10th September, 2010
Library, Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi-54
Imagine Paradise, like Jorge Luis Borges did, as some kind of library. And this sprawling Paradise of great big wooden shelves sky high that you have to manoeuver like a silverfish trapped in bookspines. The Library Space is a realm of imagined realities, the space of lore and learning and shared knowledge, where you can roam free and be what you read. Ideas rippling with magical electricity, surprising you in explosive ways. A physical landscape and simultaneously an imagined one, of the mind but rendered with texture and organisation and meaning.
Do such spaces exist in great big cities like Delhi, where the quiet hum of a reading community can come together and access knowledge and gather to think? The library is now the bureaucratized machinery of catalogues and storage space. The lack of public libraries and libraries as public spaces proclaims an absence of a culture of an opening up of the library to the reader,the absence of a librarian who is not merely the taxonomist of dead cellulose, and the absence of books that are not only bought or owned, but savoured in circulation.
This Friday, the 10th of September, we invite librarians, publishers, readers and book lovers to to reflect on the role of libraries as a site of public gathering and learning in the city.
Join us for a conservation with:
The Delhi Urban Platform invites you
to a discussion on
Libraries and the City
6 pm, 10th September, 2010
Library, Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi-54
Imagine Paradise, like Jorge Luis Borges did, as some kind of library. And this sprawling Paradise of great big wooden shelves sky high that you have to manoeuver like a silverfish trapped in bookspines. The Library Space is a realm of imagined realities, the space of lore and learning and shared knowledge, where you can roam free and be what you read. Ideas rippling with magical electricity, surprising you in explosive ways. A physical landscape and simultaneously an imagined one, of the mind but rendered with texture and organisation and meaning.
Do such spaces exist in great big cities like Delhi, where the quiet hum of a reading community can come together and access knowledge and gather to think? The library is now the bureaucratized machinery of catalogues and storage space. The lack of public libraries and libraries as public spaces proclaims an absence of a culture of an opening up of the library to the reader,the absence of a librarian who is not merely the taxonomist of dead cellulose, and the absence of books that are not only bought or owned, but savoured in circulation.
This Friday, the 10th of September, we invite librarians, publishers, readers and book lovers to to reflect on the role of libraries as a site of public gathering and learning in the city.
Join us for a conservation with:
Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Media practitioner, filmmaker, writer, and reader)More information here.
Sikander Changezi (Founder of a community library in Old Delhi)
Chiki Sarkar (Editor-in-chief of Random House India)
Avinash Jha (Librarian, CSDS)
Cordelia Jenkins (Journalist at Mint)
Anjana Chatthopadhyay (Director, Delhi Public Library)
Sheeba Cchachi ( Installation artist, photographer, activist, and writer)
