Advertisement is like Botox — well almost. It helps smoothen wrinkles — real and metaphorical — with or without consent. So it has been with a commercial on Facebook featuring Dhara, an imaginative — but unreal — young woman who drives around her bookmobile — a library on wheels — spreading the joy and light of books to nooks and corners of the city.
Unfortunately for Facebook, Satabdi, a flesh-and-blood, feisty lady and Dhara’s alter ego in real life, has seen through the social network’s sleight-of-hand. In a scathing Facebook post, Satabdi — she is the co-founder of Walking BookFairs — wrote that in the course of her journey with her bookmobile for 35,000 kilometres in the last seven years, she has encountered threats of rape and murder, killer highways, goons, surly politicians and unhelpful policemen but — unlike what the Facebook ad shows — “no people offering me tempos, no people who turn it magically into a bookmobile, no romantic pond side locations, absolutely nowhere you can park a bookmobile as you please, and no people who just turn up in hundreds to read books.”
April — the National Bookmobile Day falls this month — is the perfect occasion to look into some of the other existential crises faced by the chalaman library that Satabdi chose not to mention in her message. Technological advancement — the rise of the digital library — has made books, at least their electronic avatars, far cheaper and more accessible, threatening to derail the libraries on wheels. The high costs of operating these enterprises have raised concerns with their patrons, and there has also been some talk of their carbon footprint.
Interestingly, most resources on Google — Facebook’s pal — offer a rather rosy history of the library on the move. There is the reference to The British Workman’s report on George Moore in the nineteenth century whose “perambulating library” sought to “diffuse good literature among the rural population”. Across the Atlantic, there was the librarian, Mary Lemist Titcomb — “prim”, “ proper” and “frosty in manner” — who went on to popularize a mobile library wagon, a horse-drawn carriage shepherded by the library janitor, that took books to the forgotten corners of that land. South Asia’s first mobile library started in India in 1931: we have S.R. Ranganathan to thank for that.
There is a case for widening the ambit of public information on these fascinating pioneers of books on wheels. How, for instance, did conservative America take to a woman nursing a passion to spread the printed word? Is it the pious zeal to portray these women as heroines that has led to the excision of their trials and tribulations?
What bind Satabdi to Mary Titcomb are their willingness and ability to break new ground. But the path to new ground — no matter what Facebook says — is inevitably paved not with gold but stones.
