Books in little hands

Reading may be the only means left to us to open minds and encourage free thinking. This process has to begin with the young, and a step forward was taken on World Literacy Day marked nationally this month with the Alif Laila Book Bus Society which announced a new scheme to encourage children across the country to open up libraries in their schools or communities. The book bus, familiar to many generations of Lahore’s children, has been running since 1978 and aims to provide books at low cost to children everywhere in the city. The recent innovative scheme by the Alif Laila Society requires that children anywhere fill in a form and apply to open a library. They would manage and run these themselves. A carton of 50 books would be provided to them to start up with. Each year, an annual ‘best practice’ award would be given to the three best run libraries in order to encourage their young managers.
Our country desperately needs more schemes such as this. We need to take guns out of the hands of people, especially children and teenagers, and replace them with books. It is also true that books are accessible to too few because of their price and the lack of encouragement to read comes from within an educational system driven by rote learning. In this scenario, the initiative taken by Alif Laila is something that deserves to be applauded. The sight of a child with a book in his or her hands always offers us some hope for the future. It reminds us that literacy could help us climb out of the pit into which we have fallen. This is what our nation needs more than anything else. And the sooner we begin, the better. It will be fascinating to see how the children who would be reached through the many societies and agencies the book bus has worked with for nearly four decades will put the libraries into place and how communities which may never have otherwise had a chance to visit a library will adapt to the wondrous idea of borrowing a book to read and then handing it back for someone else to benefit from it in the same manner.