Smitten by books, little kids in this Andhra Pradesh town have become bookworms

By Sahana Maddali

On February 14, a medical student in Andhra Pradesh’ Ananthapur town, made his family’s love affair with books, public: they made their personal library open to the people of the town, and the first ones to be smitten by Anantapur People's Library are little kids who have their summer vacation.

A final year student at Sri Venkateswara Medical College in Tirupati, Rohith says the library has around 5,000 books including some rare ones on Telugu poetry, painstakingly collected by his father and him for the past 20 years.

“A library is a space for like-minded people to come together. We decided to make our books public so that anyone can walk in and sample our collection. Kids specially,” said Rohith.  

However, the kids section isn’t very well stocked. But he says they will soon buy books more suited to the young children who turn up to read.

The library has over 5,000 books on a range of subjects – philosophy, science, history, politics, poetry and fiction. The list of authors too is impressive. “Plato to Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ambedkar, Sartre, Foucault and Camus; Sappho to Szymborska; Dostoyevsky to Kafka; Chinua Achebe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” Rohith rattles off their names. They recently received a donation of Complete works of Bertolt Brecht from an EFLU student.

Among the rare books is a collection of Telugu poetry from 1890, and volumes published by Russian publishers such as Soviet Publishers and Marco Publishers.

Rohith’s mother Dr. Prasoona, who works at Anantapur Vaidyasala, manages the library with the help of a part-time assistant. His father Dr. Geyanand, a doctor and member of Jana Vignana Vedika, is a popular social figure in Anantapur.

For the inauguration of the library, they screened Marathi film “Court”. They look forward to arranging events every month, be it poetry sessions, group discussions or movie screenings.