Library

I went to downtown Mysore today to check out the central library; it wasn’t really what I expected (par for the course in India, so far.) Instead of the massive colonial structure I anticipated, it was a fairly non-descript concrete building with virtually no exterior markings to indicate what it was.

None of the autorickshaw drivers in my neighborhood knew its location; I had to copy a map off of Google to show them what I was looking for, but that might be more a factor of their educational and reading levels than anything specific to the library itself.

I imagined that I might be able to acquire a library card to check books out, but as soon as I entered, it was pretty clear that wasn’t the case. There was one main room with a lot of tables in it at which sat maybe fifty or sixty people, nearly all men, reading, mostly text in the Kannada script, although a handful of them were perusing English language newspapers.

I found a shelf piled floor to ceiling with books in English, although it wasn’t clear at all to me what the organization of them was. Right next to a volume on Indian philosophy, for instance, was one on Hindu law.

In any case, I pulled the Indian philosophy text from its spot and settled down to read for a half hour or so. At that point, it felt just like any library in any other part of the world I’ve been in; I could have been sitting in the graduate reading room at Suzallo library on the UW campus for all I knew.

Most of the books were pretty well-used; my copy, for instance, was practically in tatters, but that might partly be due to it having been published in 1923.

I was pleased to see that no one had committed the unforgivable sin of underlining or highlighting the text; a few of the pages had been dog-eared though; I did my good deed for the day by turning them up.