Of Books and Volunteering
Sailen Routray
 |
| Photo Credit - Shivdat Tripathi |
Over the last
decade or so Satya Nagar in Bhubaneswar
has morphed from a sleepy residential area to a commercial hub. When you go
straight down the road from the brash, new Big Bazar in the area you hit a reasonably
sized, unremarkable two storied house numbered 16 that is painted white and looks
as boring as any other house on the lane.
But you cannot miss a signboard that
is essentially a piece of carved and painted wood that says ‘Bakul Sishu Paathaagaara’
(Bakul Children’s Library) in Oriya. A small gate
leads you into a space that looks as unlike a library as you can imagine. Of course
there are books all around; but you have pictures of joyous monkeys playing on
the walls and every inch of the walls painted cheerfully with one motif or the
other in soothing bright colours.
But the physical
aspect of the library is perhaps the least unusual thing about it. The Bakul library is one of the largest children’s
libraries in the state of Orissa. It houses more than 8,000 books (primarily in
Oriya and English, and some in Hindi) as well as multimedia and other
educational material. There are no user charges for reading and referencing in
the library, and there are no formalities involved in terms of becoming a
member till now. Any child can drop in and read. Lending of books has not
started, and a small fee might be levied as and when it starts.
The library is run
by the Bakul Foundation (with Dr. Jatindra Nayak, Professor of English
Literature, Utkal University as the President of the society), and is managed by volunteers Sujit Mahapatra
and Satyajit Puhan with help from Puspalata Sethi and others.
A pledge
campaign for building the library was launched by the trio of Satyajit Puhan, young
development economist and one of the founders of the Film Society of Bhubaneswar,
Sujit Mahapatra, Ph.D. scholar of English Literature at Delhi University, and
Ayushman Sarangi computer engineer at ADOBE on the
Orissa Day, 1st April 2006 with the launching of the online pledge campaign,
"Donate Books, Build a Library" at www.pledgebank.com/bakul-library.
The goal was to mobilize a thousand people who would directly contribute (either
with cash for a book or directly with a book) to set up a library, initially
focusing on children and youth in Bhubaneswar.
The deadline to get 1,000 supporters as well as to set up the library was the 1st of April 2007; by
the time the deadline got over 1011 people had pledged support,
and the library managed to start functioning. Around two thirds of those who
signed up for the pledge were of Oriya origin, the rest being non-Oriya
including some foreigners with significant proportions of both the groups being
based out of Orissa.
The goal was not merely to create a library but to tap the
energies of volunteers; as Sujit Mahapatra puts it, ‘most people do not try to
initiate change because they know that they can contribute only in small ways
and do not see how their small contributions can bring about any change. As a
result of which, they do nothing and only crib about things. They get cynical
that things can never change. We are trying to tell people that change is
possible and they can be the agents of that change. By coming together with our
small little contributions, we can bring about a change in not only the lives
of others, but also in ourselves.’
The inauguration
date was marked by a small function and the library itself was inaugurated by
three children including a child from a nearby slum. The Bakul pledge
campaign is already being used as a case study in IIM Calcutta and in a Delhi University
undergraduate textbook for using the internet for effective social mobilization
tool for positive social change.
But the size of the library and the use of
the internet for mobilization are not the only things that make the library
unique. The entire collection has been built
with the voluntary contributions of ordinary people without any funding from corporate
or institutional sources. Apart from the help of the numerous individual
supporters, drives for book collection for the library at educational
institutions like the University of Waterloo, Canada, Duke University, USA,
HP, Bangalore,
and BITS Pilani have been important. Bakul plans to build an Online Library
system that can help its users to check the availability of books and
multimedia material, to place a request and to renew already borrowed books etc.
The library has already met its target of a
thousand footfalls, and has partnered with organizations working with
disadvantaged children such as Khelaghara (a school
for slum children) Anand Ashram (an
orphanage), the B.B.C.
School for the
Differently Able, and the Thakkar Bapa Special Hostel for tribal students. The library is involved in extending its
services to as many disadvantaged children in the area as possible. With the help of Mr Ramesh Swain, a
prominent local architect, an amphitheatre is being built behind the library so
as to facilitate storytelling sessions, theatre workshops etc.
The library plans to promote a good reading culture,
especially among the children and youth by promoting activities like
storytelling sessions, film screenings educational workshops, creative writing
workshops. Many initiatives to such an
effect have already been undertaken. On Gandhi Jayanti last year Sarbeswar Das,
a noted Gandhian, talked to some tribal children from a local government school
on Gandhi and Gandhism. On 14 November 2007 (Children's Day), children
from 12 government and private schools from across the city volunteered to
convert a public wall opposite the Bakul Children's Library into a children’s
art wall by painting it up on the theme of "Bhubaneswar- Our City."
Bakul has
also participated at the Sishu Prativa Congress organized by UNICEF and the Education
Department of the Government of Orissa on the occasion of Children's Day, 2007;
it replicated itself at the venue of the Congress for 2 days and there was
a parallel Bakul Children's Library at the playground of the Unit IX Boys High
School in Bhubaneswar that was housing the Congress. Art charades, theatre
and reading session were organised by Bakul for the children. All these
activities took place in Oriya. But the most popular event was the Children's
Community Storybook where children collectively wrote stories, primarily in
Oriya. Over a period of two days, about seventy children ended up writing 14 stories.
On 13 January 2008, 18 children
from primarily fifth and sixth standards from four private schools performed an
English adaptation by
Roald Dahl of the story Snow White and Seven Dwarfs to a packed audience of
children from various schools of the city, their parents and theatre
enthusiasts in the auditorium of the Utkal Sangeet Mahavidyalaya. Bhubaneswar. It was the
result of a month long theatre workshop conducted by Nicole
Suchanek (director of the play and social work student from Germany, an intern at Bakul).
Melissa Cornacchia and Melanie Eidecker, both international social work interns
working at Orissa coordinated the dance and costumes and props respectively. The
children were integrally involved with the planning of the play, and the
emphasis was not so much on producing a brilliant show as to facilitate
children’s learning and fun. This is only one instance of volunteers, in this
case international volunteers, who are expanding the range of the
organization’s activities by their own initiative.
Bakul’s
also plans to give a fillip to the production of children’s literature in
Orissa as well as contribute towards scholarship on children’s issues. A public
lecture titled "The Impact of Imagery in Picture Books for Young
Children" by Professor Ellen Handler Spitz organized on 7 January 2008 at the Bakul
Children's Library, was a step in that direction. Professor Ellen Spitz teaches
at the University
of Maryland, US, and is
an eminent scholar on children’s issues and their imagination.
The story of
this lecture is also the story of how Bakul is slowly turning into a node for
various kinds of volunteering. Prof.
Spitz had originally planned a trip to some other city in India for some academic work. She
heard about Bakul’s work and offered to come down to Bhubaneswar at her own cost and deliver a
lecture in English. It was open to all and was well attended by people from the
development sector working in the fields of education and children.
But children are not the only constituency
that Bakul is trying to address. It recently hosted a Film Festival on the ‘Great
Masters of Contemporary Western Art’ from 20-23 December 2007 that was a
relative success with around 50-60 people attending the festival every day with
most of the viewers being students of the arts. The festival screened feature
films on contemporary western masters such as Anish Kapoor, Allen Jones, Lucian
Freud and Francis Bacon. The focus of the festival was on David Hockney, arguably
the greatest living painter in the world with three films on him being screened.
The festival was open to all and was
intended to provide exposure to the art students of the state to the work of the
greatest artists of the world. This is another example of the culture of
volunteerism that Bakul is trying to foster in the state. A promising Oriya artist,
Birendra Pani, who was visiting London
for work came across the films and thought that Bakul can organize a festival
for young art students in the state, and got the movies to Bhubaneswar for screening.
As an example between the proposed synergy
between art, culture and development strung together by volunteerism that is a
part of the vision of Bakul, more than a dozen promising, young artists are having
a show of their work in a major art gallery in Kolkata in the first week of
March this year the proceeds from which will go towards strengthening the work
of Bakul. The organization also sees this is as a first step towards building a
people’s art gallery and cultural centre that will work towards the
democratization of the ‘high’ arts in the state and beyond.
The principle guiding Bakul’s initiatives is
as simple as it can get; neither let funding/funding agencies’ priorities
determine work, nor push for what the organization sees itself as a need of the
people it wants to work with, but to work as a node, a social space that acts
as a catalyst to get people together to volunteer together for the betterment
of a greater collectivity. In fact volunteerism lies at the heart of Bakul’s
vision; apart from Puspalata none of the people working at the library take a
salary from Bakul. Therefore, interns are increasingly seen as a major
component of the organization’s work.
The long term plans involve the setting up
of a research and documentation centre that will do two things simultaneously;
it will try and fill in the gaps in social science research in the state and
the region, and act as the node for filling in gaps in undergraduate education
in the surrounding area by having extension programmes as well by morphing into
an alternative space for higher learning and research. Initial steps have
already been taken in this direction.
Commitments from various prominent people
from the state of Orissa such as historian Nivedita Mohanty, Padmashri D P Pattanayak (eminent linguist and
educationist) and Dr. Kabi Mishra, (eminent cardiologist) have been received
regarding the donation of their personal collections. The research and
documentation centre will start with a library containing these personal
collections, and by forming a researcher’s collective of scholars that have an
academic interest in the state and the region.
Simultaneously, the aim is to strengthen
the children’s library at Satya Nagar so that it can act as the nucleus of a
children’s library movement in the state, and as a centre of innovation for
practice and research in Oriya Children’s literature. So the next time you are
in Bhubaneswar,
please drop in at 16, Satya Nagar to see some robust volunteerism at work; the
organization is new and there are both internal debates and critiques about the
direction of work, but this is one young organization that needs to be watched
out for.
The name Bakul refers to the grove of bakul
trees near Sakhigopal in Puri district in coastal Orissa that was the site of
the first alternative school in Orissa set up by the leaders of the nationalist
movement. It remains to be seen whether the organization fulfils the promise
that the name evokes; but the beginning looks auspicious.
Note: A slightly different version of this article was first published with a different title in the webzine 'India Together' on 25th of January, 2008. As it was written as a long report at the time, it remains substantively unchanged in its current form as a blog post.
