The Blinds In My College Library

When I first came to college, I spent quite a bit of time in the library. It was mostly to read the paper, but the library became a place where I found friends too.

And then we stopped reading.

Reading requires patience, and patience was in short shrift when life became a series of classes and assignment and table tennis. The library card in my name always had one or the other book issued, but I'd return them after reading a chapter or four. 

Around November last year, I realized that the only book I'd read from start to finish was Sputnik Sweetheart, and that wasn't from the library either.

I didn’t think things would change, until we had one of the modules we had as part of our coursework required me to do one thing, and one thing only – read.

Thank God for libraries. 

It was startling. Suddenly, there was no copy to edit, no app to master. I could choose to read whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted. Tired of staring at screens at all day, I gravitated back to the library.

I quickly found that reading had become a struggle for me – I just couldn’t concentrate on the words in front of my without reaching for my phone or daydreaming. I solved the phone problem to some extent by keeping data switched off – all the news I miss be damned. But daydreaming is trickier.

I don’t think daydreaming is bad. I like to think that my imagination took flight through the open window in my school library, where I sat and read Harry Potter and thought about how our strict geography teacher Jaysree Ma’am was exactly like Prof. McGonagall.

But all I could look at here were orange blinds pulled tightly shut. I had never seen them open in all the time I was here.

So I opened one.

Nothing happened the first time. The second time, however, one of the older library staff members came up to me and showed me how to open it properly. I had been doing it wrong earlier. I opened different blinds on different days, and usually got reprimanded a little.

“Why do you want them open?” was the main question. It’s a difficult question to answer, I realized, and one with many answers.

I could say that it’s because natural light is better for eyes than the blue light from tubelights. I could also say that it’s better for the environment. Or that the echo chambers we find ourselves in digitally, and in the real world, are precisely because we’ve closed out the meaningful things in life, like books and sunshine and sadness and pain.

But really, I just want to be able to look up from my book and see pigeons chase each other on the window-sill, while the drumstick tree sways in the sunlight. 

And that's how I found reading again, sitting near a window with the blinds open.