Personal pages of pain

Gone are the days when books were exclusively ink on parchment. And no, we aren’t talking about e-books here either. For anybody who goes by the saying ‘You know my name, not my story’, the city now has a platform to speak out. Bengaluru has a new library where readers can borrow ‘human books’ from different backgrounds and experiences to learn from them!

A Danish concept initially, it all began in the year 2000 and has spread across the world ever since. After successful chapters in Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad, it’s now namma ooru’s turn to tell tales. As organiser and spoken word artist Roshni Ross says, “The idea is unique yet simple in its inception: instead of physical books, you can go and read a library of different people with whom you can have conversations, or in figurative terms, ‘read’.” When it comes to these human books, age is no bar. “Anybody can be a book,” says Anurag Nair, a research assistant slash core committee member. “The only prerequisite is that you have to be a survivor of discrimination.” The process of framing this library revolves around people who have braved struggles and are willing to tell these stories, and also people who would like to hear these stories. All one has to do is fill up an online form, which is filtered by the core-team and then a dozen people are selected and appointed titles, just like books.

“Each session revolves around 20 to 30 minutes of spoken word tales by these books,” states Deepika Singhania. She believes everybody has a story to tell, which is what lead her to actively take the plunge into organising these libraries. “We don’t have a strict propaganda, per se,” she adds. “The idea is to bridge the gap between what people know and what the truth actually is.” About to begin its journey towards the end of this month, the team of organisers have already come up with quirky titles for their potential books. Instead of being based on the names of people, they are about the subject matter of their narration. That could be ‘Blind’, ‘Police Officer’, ‘Cancer Survivor’, ‘Refugee’ or ‘Dabbawala’, ‘Transgender’ or even ‘Single Parent’. As Ria Andrews, an advertising associate and the original brains from the city behind the entire initiative believes, “Bengaluru is like a potpourri of culture. The population is so diverse, but we are still so close. Yet there are often things one might want to be out in the open, or to know more clearly about; things that they don’t understand or might be hesitant to ask. This is what spurred me into spreading the concept. It’s all about breaking down the walls!”