Books can provide companionship to prisoners serving out their sentence — proof of this concept was evident in its implementation when prisoners at the Central Prison in Puzhal bought books from a fair held exclusively for them inside the jail.
The Prison Department requested the Tamil Nadu Nool Membaattu Kuzhumam to organise the three-day event, which ended on Saturday. On display were over 1,500 titles on subjects like Literature, History, the Tamil language, self-motivation and health, offered at a discount of 30%.
V. Rukmani Priyadharshini, Superintendent of the Central Prison-I in Puzhal, said, “We have organised such a fair exclusively, possibly for the first time. Our aim is to inculcate the reading habit among prisoners, who often find themselves lonely inside the prison and have a lot of time on their hands.”
Prisoners manned the stalls, and browsed to select books, but money did not change hands. Payments were deductible from the Prisoners’ Cash Property Account; wages are held in this account by the prison authorities when convicts earn for assigned work.
Prison officials said Tamil classics such as the Thirukural , the Thirumnathiram ; epics like the Mahabharatham and Ramayanam ; poetry by Bharathi, Bharathidasan and Nammakkal Kavignar Ramalingam, Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan and Alai Osai , short stories by Pudumaipithan, Na. Pichamurthy and Jayakanthan, and books on self-improvement, sold faster.
U. Baskaran, psychologist, Prison Department said, “Many prisoners keep updating their knowledge by reading books.”
There was a special stall on ‘jail literature’ Nelson Mandela’s Conversation with Myself , Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote , and M. K. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
