A little reasoning before presenting the solution

Before I go into how we can change things, let me go a little bit into why we even need libraries. Why do we even need to encourage a love for reading, a love for knowledge.

In this day and age of television and X-box, we also have problems like ADD, ADHD and whatever other names they may come up with for a restless mind. TV and video games have had a direct impact on decreasing attention spans and giving way to a generation of fidgety, edgy children. The extreme fast moving pictures, shorter frames per seconds are moulding the children’s minds. They are thus driven to constantly seek stimuli, which also needs to be changed in quality ever so often because their distracted minds move on and get bored so quickly. Also, the media discourage active participation. So there is no interaction possible, leading to passive, one-sided bombardment of stimuli. The mind, not just turns restless, but also loses to capacity to think for itself. (I know I’m diverging, but bear with me for a moment)

Books, on the other hand, can be experienced at a pace defined by the individual reader. Books allow the reader to participate and let her imagination conjure or fill in the blanks. The ‘handicap’ of book for being a single dimensional medium, becomes its strength. Secondly, books are vast and varied. There is one to suit every mood, interest and frame of mind. The mass access to knowledge is something that should be a defining factor in the measurement of the evolution of a society. A civilized, developed nation is defined not just by its growth rate, but by the number of schools, hospitals, libraries, open community spaces that it provides to its citizens.

There may be public libraries India, but they are hardly inviting enough to create a culture of broad based reading – as in, even though a good number of people love reading, due to little access to a wide range of books, generation after generation grows up reading the same ‘classics’ many of which may be out dated, irrelevant to the present times. As a result, there is a real danger of the interest in reading waning over time.

Because books are expensive, few can afford to buy a book without a good reference/review from a known source. This results in many good books remaining unheard of or unread simply because a) book stores have no demand for them and b) no one wants to take the chance of diverting from the tried and tested.