Sri Vivekanand Library from British Library; a new dawn.

Change is always for good, irrespective of results. When id first few moths of this year it was decided by some respected authorities from British Council, that they can not run British Library in Bhopal, there was lot of hue and cry. I for all that time kept on saying, wait, we are going to see brighter tomorrow; people on other hand didnt felt same. I had a simple logic in mind when I said that we were going to have brighter future, and the logic was that due to large number of college going student population which is aspiring to go great guns around the globe a city with 20 lakh+ population can not do without a proper library. There is a big market and if there is market there will be a system to feed the market, if it wont be British Library it ought to be some one else. There were petetions after petetions and large ammount of space was given to it in news papers those days. They all had an effect, we now have Sri Vivekanand Library in the same building and with same books (donated by British Library) but with better future. I will come to better future part slighly later, here i will like to emphasize on the effect of all that public hue. What it did is that it sped up the whole process of having a new library. If there wouldnt have been that much noise in those days, Government of MP which is now running SVL would have taken much more time to asses the requirement of public, and in due course they might have lost the British Library’s book collection.
Now comes the ‘better’ part, why am I of opinion that SVL is better than BL? BL as name suggest was highly British in nature, their interests were in coherence with British Council which was in turn looking for Indian students to fill their universities(I had no problem with that). Books and Journals which they had were mostly of British origin, which was in some way was not allowing enough American media, to come in (not in strictest sense). Now with SVL there is no ideological binding with ‘British’ and we can have wider array of events, and books in library. This means more opportunity to read various authors and journals around the globe and more seminars and discourses on various topics. Isnt it great?
People may still doubt that whther SVL can be run on the same lines of BL or not, but here also I am full of poisitivity, it surely will, primarily because it has retained good number of officials from BL and second they are not answerable to any council but directly to public as it is being run by Government of MP. Chances are that SVL might start keeping hindi literature also, once again becuase now they are not under influence of BC agenda. Only possible dark side I see into all this is that there are chances certain fluctuation in its appraoch of providing better books, literary and knowledge services due to change in governments and their respective agendas…Hey I am sure public (including me) will see into it that such a thing never occurs.