American Library Launches Hindi Books Initiative

Shashi Shekhar viewing Hindi Books

American Library To Wait
for Hindi e-Books 

 Vinod Varshney

In English-crazy India American Library has started Hindi Books’ initiative. Though the initiative is a micro drop in the ocean of English books as the first tranche is just fifty books, but as the collection would increase, this year itself it is expected to go up to one thousand, it would definitely have an impact on better understanding of American life, politics and economy by Indians.

Kala Anjan Datta has big plans

Currently Hindi books will not be available as e-books which is going to be a new trend as they have not been made available in digital form by the publishers. Whenever this happens, US library would also be able to extend e-books facility for Hindi also, tells Kala Anjan Datta, the Director of the Library. Currently some fifty thousand English titles are available as e-books in the American Library.

Datta also tells that Hindi is the first of the Indian languages initiative; the American Library would also start Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati initiatives in respective zones. There are four branches of the library at four places Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

Lydia learns Hindi on a daily basis

The initiative was inaugurated Friday by Shashi Shekhar, the Chief Editor of Hindustan. Excerpts of two books were read out by two Americans who had learnt Hindi only recently. I had an opportunity to have heard Hindi spoken by Japanese, Russian, Italians and Spaniards in the past and I found pronunciation of these two jolly Americans much better, but not sure if they had rehearsed the text several times.

Lydia Berassa of Texas read out portions of President Barrack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope”. Hearing the audition for some ten minutes I could feel that perhaps Obama has been able to pour his heart and soul in his book. His prose is poetic and now I plan to read the book before Obama comes to India in November this year.

Lydia looked immensely cheerful having learnt Hindi. She is still practicing and learning on a daily basis and may be after two three years her accent would be as natural as of any Indian from Lucknow or Bhopal.
John Fer read out a portion of Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village”. Hillary’s prose is not that poetic but it is revealing of real America, a country of biggest GDP in the world currently living with some 9 percent plus rate of unemployment.

John learnt Hindi in 6 months

General perception of America in India is shaped by its awesome GDP and very high per capita income. But many Indians do not know that America also has its own share of poor people, which Hillary has candidly discussed in her book. This gives a picture of how programmes evolve and become a national policy in the US.

John Fer as cheerful as Lydia told me about how he learned Hindi within six months. He had already learned Nepali before this for eight months. For quick learning of Hindi he gave credit to his teacher C.K. Arora, a Voice of America journalist.

John finds TV of great help in learning Hindi. He views BBC Hindi and NDTV for getting to know Hindi’s natural flavour.