The word “library” has an interesting meaning in Bangladesh. The dictionary meaning of library is “a building, room, or organisation that has a collection, especially of books, for people to read or borrow, usually without payment.”
Thus, we have public libraries, university libraries, and in some traditionally educated families, personal libraries. But in Bangladesh, library also means shops selling books and stationary items (for example, Gyankosh Library or Boi Bichitra Library).
In Bangladesh, libraries as places to borrow and read books are restricted to mainly universities, and once people are out of their universities, hardly anyone (except people involved in research or further education) goes there.
Over time, and thanks to entrepreneurship across the globe, the original meaning of libraries as “book-selling points” has been driven out of our common knowledge.
We usually only go to assigned libraries (meaning bookshops) at the beginning of our children’s school academic years to buy books, copies, and stationery.
The current age of the digitisation of knowledge, open-access to virtual libraries, and social media book clubs have taken over the physical domains of libraries. Public libraries are no longer the place to go to find diverse book collections.
Yet, as we live through the contemporary meaning of “progress” based on certain economic parameters like GDP, escalated income opportunities, and bubble economy -- we need to re-think the position of “library” in our repertoire of evolving lifestyles and economic progress.
Those of us who grew up in different parts of Dhaka in the 1990s have been witnessing the radical changes the city had to embrace suddenly, out of nowhere, in competition to be in the party of neo-liberal globalisation.
Shopping malls and high-rise apartments gave the city a “mega” metropolis look. Then came the mushrooming profitable entrepreneurship of schools (mainly English-medium), private banks, private universities, super-stores, and many other individual and group enterprises.
Dhaka city has turned into a city of opportunities. Money is in the air, one just needs the skill to grab it.
The rest of the country gradually has followed the city’s model. One can find a super-store, an English-medium school, and of course mobile phone top-up points and ATM booths, even at distant places from Dhaka city.
From the early years of the 21st century, fast food shops, international cuisine, and chain restaurants have strengthened Dhaka city’s position as a viable marketplace for international communities.
People now have disposable money to spend on leisure and aesthetic purposes.
Self-conscious youths to people in their late 30a spend their limited leisure time at numerous coffee shops, bistros, and restaurants. Beauty parlours and gyms have found their place in almost every other building of many localities.
Dhaka is living its life, despite the occasional fear that it is in the ICU, especially when rainwater halts its otherwise fast-paced life to a complete standstill.
It hardly surprises us that we have not thought of building local libraries where people can go and browse through books, and borrow some. Rather, our pecuniary definition of progress rationalises the irrelevance of public libraries.
After all, now more people have more money, and there are books even at the super-stores available for purchase. The argument, of course, is more about creating people’s capacity to buy books rather than creating their habit of reading.
Durable progress can only come when we make a fair balance between wealth and knowledge.
Real progress means revaluing the traditions helping us to move forward. Libraries are the sign of progress, based on the value given to knowledge.
The other day I was talking to a teacher of a well-known English medium school in Dhaka.
She vented her frustration about the absence of local libraries. Here, schools routinely tick off the option of taking children to the local libraries, a key requirement in the British curriculum.
I do not wish to bring examples of advanced countries such as Britain or the US, where community or local libraries are at the heart of almost every neighbourhood.
Their material and historical realities have been different from ours. All that can be said is: Dhaka city, as well as the whole country, is crowded with places where people go to make and spend money. Give us some places where money is not the only concern: Give us some libraries, please!
