yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

This piece based on my experience with Bookworm's Reading Circle is up on their website here .  Warm thanks to Bookworm and the Reading Circle participants.  Thursday evenings, 7.00 pm to 8.30 pm, some of us meet online to discuss the book we have read during the week gone by. Each of us have, of course, read the same chapter(s) from the same book. We are a part of Bookworm’s ‘Non Fiction Reading Circle’. The Bookworm team ensures timely communication ( book details, links and reminders for the meetings and such ) and also sends the books by Speed Post to those of us who do not have a copy and want to borrow one; we return the book once the sessions are over. We read the books individually, it is the discussions that follow that are a group activity. The group is small, 15 to 20 people, and smaller if the book is dense; a few of us may also drop-off as the chapters progress. The scale enables the Reading Circle to be close-knitted and informal. The group that continues, that i...

Also up at the School Magazine.  During the last week I savoured William Dalrymple's ' The Golden Road '. It was after long that I read a book with 2 dictionaries and a thesaurus by my side. This book I was keen to read since a while, the dictionaries and the thesaurus however, I picked up on whim. The thesaurus was Collins ( ~ year 2006, pages 799 ), one of the dictionaries was The Pocket Oxford ( ~ year 1999, pages 1,089 ) and the other Oxford Advanced Learners ( ~ year 1989, pages 1,579 ).   Over the recent years I have gotten used to web-based dictionaries if a computer is handy. This is fine when I am working online but seldom the case when I am reading - especially given the locations I usually read at and the positions I am then in. So, more often than not, I plan to look up the words later and then conveniently end up forgetting them. People wiser have warned, later is a time that seldom arrives! On occasions I have also convinced myself that if I keep the book a...

  Taking stock of books (and ourselves) When kids help in taking stock of books Text and images: Anshumalika Rai and Nimesh Ved Published at the Deccan Herald .   What happens when we go with our guts and trust children? A quick look at our school before we jump on to the details. We focus on languages , Hindi and English . The book room is a favoured place; many of the 250 children and 15 teachers can be seen reading here. Children of classes 7 and 8, the senior most children, also join us in taking care of the book room. The idea is to deepen their engagement with books . This year we got a tad ambitious. The annual stock-taking turned into a project: 1 room, 5 days, 1,500 books and 30 children of class 7. As we look back, we realize, that throughout the project it was not the children assisting us, as we had once envisaged, but the other way around - we were assisting the children. This brings smiles to our faces and reminds us of P L Travers’ , “ you should t...

Utpal Dutt On the Theatre Publisher: Seagull Books, Calcutta Printing Years: 2009, 2022 ISBN: 978-8-1-7046-251-4 Price: 499/- Pages: 201 As I read the book I recalled watching him as Dhurandhar Bhatawdekar – a few years ago,  Few questions also came up, How well read was he? How the hell did he manage to recall so much! How did he see where we were headed? Was he that ahead of his times?  How could he have been such direct, frank and yet so popular? How broad and deep was his repertoire? But then he was at best an enigma - someone who worked closely with Ghose, Sen and Ray, was a Shakespeare scholar, and yet known to many of his generation for his roles as a 'comedian' in Hindi cinema! Dhurandhar Bhatawdekar was just one of the many such roles.  Some lines from the book – that have stayed, On Shakespeare Urdu alone, of all Indian languages, can capture fully the sound-quality of Shakespeare’s verse. The decline of interest in Shakespeare in our times has been brought ab...

    Books in the time of COVID   Anshumalika Rai and Nimesh Ved   This piece finds place in Teacher Plus’ February 2022 issue. Thanks are due to the team at Teacher Plus and colleagues for the questions (below) and more.   In the July 2020 issue of Teacher Plus we shared the initial steps of our journey of launching the Book Room. A few months after the launch COVID struck. In this article we talk about our experiences during the COVID times.     A colleague from a sister unit, during one of his visits, asked - as we discussed a book that had just arrived – to the students of which class will you give this book to read?   One of us responded thus - we do not tell the children which books to read, they decide . As we revisited the conversation, we realized that we had moved a few steps towards understanding children, books and the two together. This conversation had taken place after the students began coming regularly post - ...

  Book fairs and book stores as learning spaces Nimesh Ved and Anshumalika Rai Published at Deccan Herald. Thanks to the team there, to the book store teams that allowed us to put in time with books and to friends who accompanied us to the book fairs. Trips to book-stores and book-fairs during recent times have had us wonder why these are not looked at as learning spaces. Not as much as they warrant for sure. We have come across children and teachers at book-fairs but these appear more of exceptions given our numbers and the immense potential these spaces harbour. But first, what we do at these spaces. Let us begin with the book-fairs. The sheer numbers of books we see at the annual book-fair at Dilli we have not come across elsewhere. Images of people squatting on the floor, chatting excitedly about books and carrying bags full of books have stayed with us since. The smaller book-fairs, like those at the university campuses in Banaras, were different. Here we noticed ...

Thanks are due to the team at Raiot. Published at Raiot here .  Adults are not reading books. Children are not reading books. These 2 lines one comes across frequently. These are, on most occasions, followed with gyan encouraging one to read. To read more. Most of this gyan also lays the blame – for fall in reading - entirely or almost entirely on technology. In other words, televisions and mobile phones are the reason for people going away from books and reading. Roald Dahl too famously written, “ So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall ”. Reading has surely come down – irrespective of age. There is little to debate on this. We now see lesser people with books – at their homes or elsewhere, book-stores and magazine-stalls are closing one by one, increasingly books are less and less part of our conversations and so on. However, let us explore the topic furthe...