Skip to main content

Library Fines

Like many new immigrants in America, one of the most positive experiences I had about the country when I first came here, was the public library system. The small town where I grew up in India had a library too. So scanty was its collection that I had managed to read everything of interest to me in two or three years.

I would compile long lists of books I'd like to see in the library and hand it to the powers that be. Sometimes my wishes would come true and being the librarian's best buddy I enjoyed privileged access to all the new arrivals. It was a good arrangement considering how limited my options were but I longed for more all the time. I could check out two books at a time for two weeks and the fines were steep.

I remember my first time inside a public library in the US - feeling overjoyed at the abundance, unlimited checkouts and the eagerness of the staff to help me find things and answer questions. J and I use the local public library a lot - its one of our favorite places to go on Saturday afternoons. I have not paid a lot of fines but never feel any diminished goodwill when I have had to. I think the modest fines keep borrowers disciplined and help them value the generosity of a service that they would otherwise take for granted or worse abuse. I would definitely not support abolishing library fines.

Comments

ggop said…
The fine for books in public libraries is a pittance unlike a fine for late rental of dvds or videos in Blockbuster. I do not support abolishing fines either!

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...