Of human library

What if instead of the books, the characters of the pages started talking to you? What if you got yourself engaged into dialogue with them! There is little doubt you would never want to miss this thrilling experience if you had any.

For the book lovers, such an exquisite experience is set to become a reality under an event to be organised by Human Library Dhaka (HLD) at Gyan Tapas Abdur Razzaq Bidyapeeth in Dhanmondi-7/A today. The four-hour programme will start at 2:00pm.

The HLD is a platform where humans of varied experience can be “borrowed” for 25 minutes instead of books. This is entirely an opposite idea of conventional library we are accustomed to see.

People have prejudices and stereotyping tendencies about different humans who belong to different communities. The persons who have faced such prejudices or social injustice will appear as “books” and will talk with the “readers” in the event under the theme “Don't judge a book by its cover”.

Five young university students -- Mushfiquzzaman Khan, Rafsanul Hoque, Upoma Rashid, Rifa Tasfia Khan and Ashrafuzzaman -- launched this platform in Dhaka.

Mushifquzzaman got this idea from humanlibrary.org, founded by Dutch national Ronni Abergel, while surfing internet last month.

"After seeing such interesting platform I decided to open up an event in Dhaka and sought permission of the founder,” he said.

While waiting for a response, which did not come instantly, Mushifquzzaman found in Facebook that a similar event was being organised in India.

So he contacted with them and collected Abergel's phone number.

"He received our call warmly and sent us an email providing official papers for the approval of opening up the event in Dhaka," said Mushifquzzaman.

WHAT IS HUMAN LIBRARY

A Human Library is an event that intends a discourse for a better understating between two people.

The young organisers say because of the untraditional nature of the initiative people first get puzzled whenever they approach them with this idea.

"We tried to share an article on our Facebook page, clarifying what the human library is," said Upoma while talking about the “book” collection process for their library.

Here, humans are books and volunteers are librarians who will help “readers” find their desired “books”, she said.

The concept of a Human Library was first initiated by Ronni Abergel in 2000 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Ronni introduced the Human Library as a social reform to encourage conversation around marginalised communities. Later, the Human Library movement was expanded to around 70 countries, according to the website of humanlibrary.org.

CATEGORIES OF HUMAN LIBRARY

Categories for human library are similar with that of the conventional library. People get to choose according to their choice in regular library to pick a book for reading. In the similar fashion, anyone in human library can choose a category or subject, on which a person will be “borrowed” instead of books for the readers.

In today's event, there will be at least 10 categories including challenged people, single mother, old people and anticipated extremist. They will share their experience with the readers about how they were judged or faced problems and overcame it.

Contacted via messenger, Roni Abergel said, "I think that stereotypes, prejudices and stigmas are universal. I believe that every society in the world can benefit from having a space to ask difficult questions and to get answers from the people who know from personal experience.

“I am thrilled to see the initiative coming from the youth of Bangladesh and it sends a very strong signal for the future of Bangladesh. That the youth are not afraid to ask to better understand how we are different but yet very much the same.”