I get the concept of a ‘human book’, I do. It’s simple and easily replicable, which I suppose is the point. A person with a wide variety of life experiences is likely to have more stories to tell than you could possibly find the time to listen to. And a well-curated selection of such individuals could, in theory, function as a “human library”, a repository of lived wisdom. However, the reason I am slightly uncomfortable with the term has to do with intent. Roland Barthes and his successors freed the text from the tyranny of authorial intent. The text was now an entity interpreted at will, with as many variants as readers. The stories told by a ‘human library’, on the other hand, are necessarily context-specific, where human intent changes the meaning of everything. A ‘human book’, therefore, feels like a contradiction in terms.
Not that it stopped people from queueing. At Delhi’s first-ever ‘human library’, held last Sunday, 11 ‘human books’ spoke to hundreds of people, entirely free of cost. The concept of a human library took root in Denmark over a decade ago, as a way of social mobilisation and fighting prejudice and misconceptions. Because the ‘readings’ took place in private spaces, people started seeing it as a ‘safe zone’ to discuss hot button issues. Today, the concept is gaining popularity throughout the world, having spread to 70 countries including the US, Australia and South Africa.
Fifteen minutes before opening time, the queue outside the venue — Innov8 at the Regal Building — snaked down three flights of stairs, and all the way to Regal Cinema’s old box-office window 30-40m away. My press card meant I could jump the queue, but there were folks who ended up waiting well over an hour to get in.
The first ‘book’ I met was 26-year-old Prashant, a Krav Maga instructor. “I’m a north Indian from Navi Mumbai,” he explained. “When I was an adolescent boy, Raj Thackeray’s influence over neighbourhoods like mine grew rapidly. One day, over 30 of my classmates, including a lot of girls, ganged up on me and beat me up very badly.” There were repeated punches to the stomach, blows to the back of the head and kicks which accounted for three of his missing teeth. One boy even stabbed him in the neck with a compass. Prashant’s parents wanted to complain to the principal, but he argued that since he would have to continue studying with these Marathi classmates, antagonising them was not the right move.
Prashant would go on to earn a black belt in jeet kune do, a kind of sophisticated martial arts system founded by Bruce Lee. “One day, I fought someone who was several inches taller than me and built like a tank,” Prashant remembers with a smile. After being knocked out by a single punch, Prashant realised the importance of technique. Hence Krav Maga — a magpie-like collection of bits from several martial arts around the world, all geared towards controlled aggression and street-fighting ability. It was developed by Israeli defence forces. When I asked Prashant whether he still had rage issues, common among bullying victims, he told me, “That’s the starting point of Krav Maga. It’s about controlling your anger, using that energy elsewhere.”
What you take away from a book also depends upon your own circumstances. Two young women, both college students, were listening to Prashant alongside me. He told them that women would be ideal candidates for Krav Maga because they genuinely needed the protection more and that women “lacked the self-belief to take on attackers”. They agreed and told him they would join his class in Saket.
There were other human books all around us, in separate cabins. The Buddhist teacher, the cancer survivor, the intrepid solo traveller-around-the-world. The organisers were caught a little off-guard by the sheer volume of people who had turned up. But for the most part, the pages turned over peacefully.
The last human book I spoke to was a 21-year-old visually challenged singer named Rajeev. Rajeev grew up thinking his grandparents were his parents, and that his real parents were his bhaiya (elder brother) and bhabhi (sister-in-law) instead. Once he moved to Delhi, he found out the truth from his birth certificate — caring for a visually challenged child was tough. Fighting familial opposition, he was doing stage shows at 10. By the time he was 17, he had performed alongside Bollywood biggies such as Sonu Nigam, Shankar Mahadevan and Udit Narayan.
In the middle of Rajeev’s story, however, a young African man entered the room. I requested Rajeev to stop and asked my co-reader if he understood Hindi. He replied that he didn’t. He was a programmer from Congo, interning at a special needs school in Noida, learning how to make software more accessible for the differently abled.
I asked Rajeev to pause after every sentence, so that I could translate his words into English for our Congolese friend. Sometimes, the programmer would immediately fire back a question, which I would translate into Hindi for Rajeev. For about half an hour, there was more than one book being read and we were learning on the job, all three of us.
(The article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine's BLInk.)