CITY FRAMES: The custodians of Bengaluru’s reading culture

BENGALURU: Whenever I see teens indoctrinated to technology boasting about the features of the latest Kindle reader or similar gadgets, I tend to groan. I’d like to say that they do not know what they are missing out on by shunning paperbacks. Importantly, I’d be remiss if I do not tell them about the central role played by Bengaluru’s mobile library in inculcating the habit of reading and fostering a culture of love for books among its denizens.Kindles, PDFs or iPhones may be synonymous with book lovers today, but in an era when they weren’t around, Bengaluru’s bibliophiles knew how to live it up. Why not, for week after week, their favourite bestseller paperback would land practically at their doorstep. The icing on the cake was that this at point involved a very nominal payment — costing anywhere between Rs 50 to Rs 150. A pittance when compared to the world of goodness it would fetch.To bookworms belonging to an earlier generation — the millennials in particular — the mobile library or ‘Nagara Sanchaari Granthaalaya’ was nothing short of a godsend from the heavens. It was a large bus retrofitted with bookshelves and stocked with books, novels by leading authors, novellas, biographies, comics and magazines in at least ten different languages. At one point of time, it even had copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The mobile library, with a driver and staff to scrutinize the books being returned, was up on a tight schedule and would visit designated locations on specific days of the week, thereby reaching out to subscribers in every nook and corner of the city.The mobile library introduced me to a world of awe-inspiring fictional characters in new books. That included Tintin and Captain Haddock in their global expeditions, the wickedly humorous way in which the Gauls, Asterix and Obelix, would nix Caesar’s evil ambitions, the tourist guide Raju and his inexplicable obsession with the dancer Rosie in RK Narayan’s ‘The Guide’, and the giant hoax that reaches fruition in Archer’s ‘Not a penny more, not a penny less’. Since this is a newspaper column and not one of Google’s storage servers, I am constrained to limit the list.The mobile library played a role in my initiation to adulthood, via the racy and gripping novels of Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon. Later, when I was in college, every classmate of mine would save up pocket money to buy a Dan Brown paperback, original or pirated. I’d patiently wait until Saturday for the arrival of the mobile library in my neighbourhood to borrow it. This was around the time the Da Vinci Code was a raging success (and even inspired an insipid movie adaptation).I say this, and I am not ashamed to exaggerate, for such was the quality and variety of books on offer, that the mobile library would qualify as the Doomsday Vault of books. If ever a global disaster were to occur and the human race were have to go into hiding, I would happily ensconce myself in the mobile library.I have grown up on a healthy diet of books, but the library seems impoverished today. And we only have public apathy and misuse to blame. At first, pages started disappearing from books. Soon it was the entire book. Basic courtesies such as returning books diminished. The low entry fee, meant to facilitate public inclusion, became the mobile library’s biggest bane. Its shelves, which were once overflowing with books, became bare. Books that remained were invariably dog-eared, damaged or were with pages missing. The shelves that I would look forward to, began to go empty.It is ironic that our popular culture believes in vilifying politicians.(In this column, people record their impressions of Bengaluru)