Turning the Library upside down

Written by Deepali

It was a bright sunny morning and we were cleaning our downstairs office room again when I blurted out what was on my mind for quite some days…. “Why can’t we shift the downstairs office room up and bring the Pre-Teen and Teenage sections down??” The suggestion was received with great enthusiasm and suddenly there was a sense of excitement all over the place and I was handed over the responsibility of doing the needful. It was decided that 23^rd of March would be the ‘D’ day and a flurry of mails were sent by me to one and all and no one and I mean no one was allowed to take leave on the big day. Just allocating duties and shelves was not enough and neither was getting men to shuffle the furniture. I suddenly realized that we had to offload all the books from the top floor and do the same with our office stuff downstairs too…..Phew!!! The sheer volume of books overwhelmed me, Jewel, Analia and Sabina but then what else would you expect in a library if not books   and we carried on painstakingly putting books in cartons, boxes, baskets, tubs etc. and listing them according to the shelves they were in. It was a nice time for all of us to experience the extent of the Bookworm collection in the physical sense !

The big day arrived and our BW troops marched into the library in their drabbest clothes and we started the chain of passing along the boxes of books from top to down and carrying our office paraphernalia upstairs. It was at a planning meeting that one male colleague wondered how the shift could be done with a bunch of women and our young women Analia, said “girl power” !!! That did it, the women moved boxes and we are the salt of the earth, we know it.

With generous doses of chilled soft drinks and savouries, we carried on tirelessly and voila…suddenly everything began to find it’s place. We all took a deep breath, rested for a moment and contemplated, savoured and examined the monumental task of removing each book from each carton, box and basket and returning it to its rightful place. Amidst good natured bantering and ribbing and arguments, this task was accomplished too. It was a sense of purpose, a commitment to the work and a camaraderie that exists at Bookworm when work has to be done together that got us through this huge project.

We now a lower ground floor dedicated ONLY to books and you come, walk in and experience the space.

“Change is not pleasant but change is constant. Only when we change and grow, we will see a world we never know.”