India and the United States are among two of the world’s great democracies. Our nations share common values and celebrate thoughts and ideas that inspire one another. Mahatma Gandhi was significantly inspired by the American thinker Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay, ‘Civil Disobedience’, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was in turn inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement.
My experience at an American university under a Rotary Foundation scholarship sponsored by the Rotarians of my city, Pune, and as the Washington Correspondent of The Times of India (1992-94), were illuminating and inspiring. I am happy to present here with the first in a series of essays to celebrate India-U.S. friendship and the common values shared by our two nations.
The Library of Congress
The world’s largest library, The Library of Congress, which I visited frequently while in Washington D.C., cast a deep impression on me.
One memorable visit was in 1993 during a major diplomatic flashpoint between India and the US over a remark made by Robin Raphael, the then Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, at a background briefing of the State Department. I shall elaborate on this episode in a future essay.
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The story was hot and time was of the essence. I needed to quickly see the New York Times’ reporting on the 1947 Jammu & Kashmir accession to India. I rushed to the Library of Congress and placed my request with the staff. I was courteously guided to the section with microfilm cabinets, labelled year-wise from well before 1948. I just had to pull out the relevant drawer and within minutes, was scanning the 1947 NYT microfilm cassette in the microfilm reader. Going back and forth over the digitized pages, I identified the clippings I needed and asked the staff for photo-copies.
Once again, there was a big surprise in store for me. I was told that the machine had a photo-copying unit attached to it and and all I had to do was to use the library’s pre-paid photocopying card, or drop a Quarter (25 cents) in the machine and press a button. The page on the screen would be photo-copied.
Armed with these photo-copies I rushed back to my home office, just a few blocks away, and hammered out my report for The Times of India.
I was so very thrilled with my experience that I thought of writing a Sunday feature for my paper. Our senior editor Bachi Karkaria who headed the Sunday Review magazine was most gracious and welcomed the feature.
The details I gathered were mind-boggling. It was fascinating for me to learn that the library had a collection of 98 million items, growing at the rate of one addition every six seconds. It has a number of priceless artefacts in its collection, such as one of the three copies of the Gutenberg Bible– the frist-ever book printed on moveable type; personal belongings of Abraham Lincoln on the day he was assasinated and the original draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting. In 1992 when i wrote the piece, the library had a staff of 5,000; seven field offices including those at New Delhi and Moscow, and a budget of over $260 million!
Today, the library has a collection of 175 million items, adding about two million items every year. It is no exaggeration when I call this library that single spot on earth with a repository of human knowledge.
Established in April 1800, the Library of Congress is the national library of the United States. It is so-called because it is meant to serve as a research and reference library for U.S. lawmakers.
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Such was the high importance accorded to knowledge by the founders of the American nation, that not only is the library open to everyone above the age of 16 but even illegal immigrants “can legally enter and use the library if they satisfy the standard entry criteria.”
On a few occasions I visited the public library in my small university town Indiana in Pennsylvania and was impressed by the substantial book collection, infrastructure and service in a small town library. It at once reminded me of the three-storied British Council Library on Fergusson College Road, Pune, which, alas, closed down around the Covid-19 pandemic.
India does not need to re-create the Library of Congress– all that we need are decent public libraries and reading rooms for students across the country.
There’s a lot that’s inspiring about the United States, even as I am distraught by the unjustified war on Iran and the blind support to Israel amidst the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian children. And yet, there is hope and promise of an enlightened American leadership in the future and the strengthening of shared values between India and the United States.
