Mekhala Mama

Wore my @kin_tem Ayong necklace as a belt & contemporary Sümi inspired earrings to add Naga accents to my @ampmfashions set to speak at @shivnadarschool ‘s 2nd Annual ILM (Inquiry, Learning & Mindfulness) conference. The highlights were listening to @jilpanz & Geetanjali Shree speak. A day of unlearning, listening & facilitating deep discussions on how to steer children into reading that is meaningful, pleasurable & useful.
For most of us, the Dewey Decimal System is synonymous with library. I remember how excited I was to learn about this classification in 5th grade and how I returned home to classify all the books in the house into the DDC and started a home library—which ran with great success for a few years. From that time, one of my reading pastimes has been to play with classifying my books: to take A Suitable Boy from the 800s and place it in the 300s, or after a third reading, in the 400s. What began as a childish whimsy taught me to regard the Dewey Decimal System with a kind of irreverence that has unfettered my reading journey. It also exposed the corollaries of classification: where we place knowledge determines what we place it beside, what relationships become visible, and what conversations become possible. My session ‘Nurturing Roots’ began from this premise and asked librarians to imagine other ways of organising knowledge—through our lived experience & the immediate world we inhabit. But I also proposed moving beyond collecting & curating to co-creating. Begin by noticing who is included, who remains outside, and whose version of a story has acquired authority. And then to ask what still needs to be written, recorded or published, and how librarians might influence writers and publishers to address those absences. A living library need not resolve these differences. It can allow contradictory, even warring, perspectives to sit beside each other and initiate conversations. That way our libraries can participate in shaping what can be known, what might yet be written, and the conversations through which a community continues to understand itself. And thereby fulfil its true essence and purpose - mediate epistemology itself.