CHENNAI, TAMIL NADU, 10/11/2018: Children during the Story telling session at the newly opened MLS Library's Children Section, at Madras Literary Society, DPI Campus, College Road, Nungambakkam, in Chennai on November 10, 2018. Photo: R. Ravindran
“I like the Harry Potter”, said 11-year-old Pranav. This was the first chance he’d had to get his hands on the series his friends were always talking about. Nine-year-old Metha was even more excited. “It’s so decorated and nice!”, she said. “I love the green leaves all around — it feels like the jungle in the story we’re reading!”
Eventually, she’s hoping to get through every book in the library: “I’ll at least try!” Young readers are flocking to the 200-year-old Madras Literary Society library, nestled in the unsuspecting DPI complex, after the opening of a new children’s section earlier this month. The venture has brought in fresh readers faster than ever before.
The kids’ zone saw its first use at an opening ceremony on November 10, when the red ribbon was cut on a candy-coloured, book-crammed playpen at the foot of the library’s Indo-Saracenic front door. Around 80 people including members, sponsors, staff and children gathered in the College Road library’s cavernous main hall for storytelling, an art-display, and upbeat speeches — all in the hope of enticing the city’s most discerning bookworms: its children.
With bright child-sized furniture, jungle decor and 500 hand-picked titles in English, Tamil, Hindi and even French, organisers have tried every trick in the book to please their choosy new readers. It seems to have worked.
CHENNAI, TAMIL NADU, 10/11/2018: Children at the newly opened MLS Library's Children Section, at Madras Literary Society, DPI Campus, College Road, Nungambakkam, in Chennai on November 10, 2018. Photo: R. Ravindran
MLS General Secretary Thirupurasundari Sevvel observed that since the opening of the children's section, the library has seen more traffic than ever. Fifty children come every Saturday to make use of their new den, enjoy storytelling sessions , and bury their noses in their favourite books.
At the inauguration she hailed “a new chapter in the library’s history”. She added, “We were concerned about making sure there were members for the future. But we think the new section will welcome lots of children for life.”
Organisers had been worried that the library would become an anachronism in the 21st Century. MLS has stood more or less unchanged since 1812. It is the oldest library of its kind in Asia, and more than two-thirds of its 65,000 books are over three centuries old.
On floor-to-ceiling shelves creaking with dust-covered books, there are precious gems: peeling copies of the Gita , a four-century-old edition of Aristotle, and a 15-foot-long vellum map of the Ganga.
But the richness of these volumes would mean nothing with no one to read them, as committee member Jaya Mahbubani explained.
“I couldn’t get in for the cobwebs when I first stumbled upon this library”, she said. “All very charming, but we wanted more people to know about it. The cobwebs were swept away to prepare for the children’s section. I was a little sad because I wanted them to be there — but we’re decluttering. We have the Dewey Decimal system in place, we want to go online, and now we have the children’s section.”
With young readers as ambitious as Metha now on board, the library’s future looks like it’s in safe hands.
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