The human touch

In a bid to roll out a unique and quirky event, students Sahil Sharma and Shivani Goel collaborated with the young entrepreneur Ishan Gupta, the owner of Lumos Coco, which is a restaurant in Chandigarh’s Industrial Area. On Sunday, Chandigarh stood witness to the functioning of a Human Library even though it was just for a day. What comes across like a small-scale, more interactive TED talk event, Human Library gets at one place a number of people who act as books and reservoirs of knowledge as they interact for some 20 minutes with readers (the audience). 

Sahil, 20, a student at Punjabi University, explains the concept: “The Human Library is not a very complicated concept; here, instead of borrowing a book you can borrow a human being for 20 minutes and hear their story, dispelling prejudices and leaving the participants with a wider perspective,” he says.

First steps

Human Library is a place where books are replaced by human beings. Though this concept may sound new, it has been popular in the west. The Human Library or Menneskebiblioteket as it is called in Danish was developed in Copenhagen in the spring of 2000, as a project for Roskilde Festival by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany, and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen.

The original event was open eight hours a day for four days straight and featured over 50 different titles. The broad selection of books provided readers with ample choice to challenge their stereotypes and so they did. More than a thousand readers took advantage, leaving books, librarians, organisers and readers stunned at the impact of the Human Library.

“The Patiala chapter in collaboration with Furever Friends shall be breaking stereotypes at Lumos Coco (Industrial Area, Phase 1). There will be eight books addressing the commonly dealt stereotypes of the society. Imagine a bi-sexual kathak dancer talking openly about his choice and an animal-rescuer teaching us the real value of life,” says Sahil. 

Interaction zone

The event features nine human books, each addressed by a title and not the name. While Shrutee Rao Rathore talks of cruelty free fashion and is titled Spinach and Suave, Varun Gupta, the Realistic Vegan, talks of vegan lifestyle. There are others too, like The Unconventional Storyteller Ishita Uppal, a student at Panjab University, who started an NGO called SWAG — Strong Women And Girls. 

“In 2013, my father made a proposal to the Haryana Government to come up with a programme that saves girls. It was accepted and for long, I was the ambassador of Haryana government’s ‘Save the Girl Child’ campaign,” says the 21-year-old. The event also had human books titled Prima Ballerina (a homosexual kathak dancer), Bullet Raja (a biker), The Furever Happy Guy (Vikas Luthra), The Right Spin (Vivek Mehra) and Expedition—a journey of 1000 miles (Daljinder Singh), at the venue.    

— Amarjot Kaur