It's Monday morning. I told one of my colleagues, “There is a new advertisement of Kerala Tourism on YouTube. It's beautiful.’’
“Is it the usual cliche—greenery and backwaters?” she asked.
I replied, “No, it's different.”
Kerala's 'library movement' was a revolution bridging the social, economic, cultural and political differences of Malayalis. Villagers could approach the libraries without worrying about any social barriers. It became a meeting place for the young and the old, educated and uneducated, to discuss and debate everything under the sun—from world politics to arts to films. From the reading rooms, a new generation emerged and they viewed their society and the world with the wisdom they had acquired within the walls of the libraries. Kerala Tourism department's latest advertisement, A Reading Room With A View!, is “a tribute to a land where myriad shades of cultures seep into each other, contrasting ideas converse in reading rooms and diverse beliefs walk side by side on vibrant streets”.
In the advertisement, people enter and leave the windows, rather, the frames, of the reading room. A man dressed in Portuguese attire passes by, in an obvious reference to the presence of the Portuguese in this part of the world. He then gives way to a Christian nun, followed by some Muslim children greeting her. A Theyyam artiste enters and leaves. A person pastes a Kurosawa film festival poster on the wall, and the video reveals it is a village library, where the windows overlook a temple across the road. The library wall shows who they really are—people inspired by Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Akira Kurosawa... The world passes by as the reader immerses himself in the pages in the library.
A Reading Room With A View! gives a peek into Kerala culture in three minutes. The video, produced for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, shows, in Kerala, contradictions coexist in harmony.
