In cooperation with the NGO Star Wellness & Care Foundation, the open-air library in Bindra Park in New Delhi was enriched with literary works from the Europe Readr digital platform and with some books by Slovenian authors in physical form. The pleasant green surroundings of the library allow visitors to enjoy reading good books and daily newspapers as well as to spend time in the company of friends and meet other readers. In collaboration with the Webcom Foundation, an event dedicated to the environment and the future of living was organised for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.
A visit to the Bindra Park library
We paid a visit to the open-air library set in idyllic surroundings under the treetops in Bindra Park in New Delhi on 22 October. In cooperation with the NGO Star Wellness & Care Foundation, the library was enriched with literary works from the Europe Readr digital platform and with some books by Slovenian authors in physical form. Posters and bookmarks with the Europe Readr QR code are available at the library, providing effortless access to the Europe Readr platform. The pleasant green surroundings of the library allow visitors to enjoy reading good books and, through the literary works from the Europe Readr platform, they can learn about social and environmental challenges and the future of living from the European perspective.
Children’s workshop
In collaboration with an NGO – the Webcom Foundation – an event dedicated to the environment and the future of living was held on 3 November for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Both topics were introduced to the children through listening to stories and creating useful items from waste materials.
In the workshop, the storyteller Seema Wahi Mukherjee used words and pictures to present and familiarise the children with issues around the protection of their local environment, the importance of clean water, and to think about the future of living. In her stories, she focused on locations the children were familiar and able to identify with, and on stories which not only sparked their imagination, but also directed their attention towards their long-term duty of preserving the natural environment. The children also had an opportunity to browse through books and picture books in Hindi and English that spur thinking on this topic and call for greater social responsibility.
The practical part of the workshop was dedicated to creating items from waste materials – cardboard, newspaper, plastic bottles, etc. In the future, the items crafted will remind the children that it is possible to create something beautiful and useful from waste materials.
‘Gast Groeber’s short stories in Every Day Just Hides Another put the focus on characters that increasingly distance themselves from their usual surroundings. The story ‘A Village Idyll’ describes the life of a man who has been ostracized by the villagers ever since he ran over a boy with his car. Groeber smartly shows how the real circumstances of the accident, which have an essential influence on our moral judgement, are no longer taken into consideration at all once the culprit is found. Groeber’s description of the threat to the individual by the Others is also cleverly done: in these stories, it is never clear from the start whether the threat is merely imaginary or very real. Interpersonal relations float between the superficial and a precarious intimacy.
What should be highlighted in Every Day Just Hides Another is the obvious desire to achieve a consistent topical conception that only a few texts don’t follow. Groeber also aims at a decidedly literate, yet always natural language, which is quite an achievement given the limited stock of role models. The attempt for example to construe a character perspective using only impersonal phrases and infinitives that the author makes in ‘The Unbearable Weight of Waiting’ is utterly successful.’