The Towns Mirror Special: Sorry Cooke Town, the library is closed

The Towns Mirror Special: Sorry Cooke Town, the library is closed
A childrens’ workshop at Caro before it was shut
By Romila Padhi

After a modest three-year run, Hutchins Road’s beloved neighbourhood library, Caro, shuts shop for good


In the September of 2018, Oscar D’Souza, his wife, Akshaya Krishnan and their friend Rakshith Rao got the idea of starting a library. D’Souza and Krishnan have been bookworms all their lives. Coupled with that, their fairly massive individual collections were enough motivation to start something of their own, purely out of passion.

Rao, it turns out, had another 2,000 books stored in a friend’s house that needed to be moved elsewhere. The three put their heads and hands together and moved their collection to D’Souza’s family home, which was unoccupied at that time.

Set up as a community space, Caro Library was named in the memory of D’Souza’s older sister, Carolyn. The library is located opposite a school, on the first floor of a two-storeyed independent house. For many residents of Cooke Town, a monthly subscription of Rs 150 to rent books from this library on 84/1, 1st Floor, on Hutchins Road was a cheap ticket to a treasure trove of books.

Within a year, the library had gathered about 6,000 books ranging from management tomes and Indian authors to thrillers and fiction, all donated very generously by residents. There are about 2,000 children’s books in their collection.

From classics like Malory Towers or Harry Potter for children to romance favourites from Danielle Steel, or popular fiction like The Hunger Games series for young adults, this library had something for everybody, including more serious books on the ideologies of Descartes or Sartre.

Unfortunately, it is shutting down now. “We had shut the library in March, last year, because of the pandemic. In January, things seemed to get better… But the second wave hit the country so badly. We wanted to resume things but there’s a third wave in the talks now. It was a difficult decision for us so we took a while, but it looks like it’s time to move on,” said Krishnan.

D’souza and his family had been managing Caro until now. In its heyday, the library has seen its fair share of bustle. Krishnan and her sister in law, Marissa Miranda, hosted several summer camps for children and crochet and mandala art classes for adults in this community space.

As the library shuts down for good, all that will remain of it will be the lingering smell of thousands of books, some empty cartons and shelves, lots of fond memories and a beautiful mural of a bird perched on a tree. Krishnan had painted this mural on the wall at the entrance of the library while setting it up.


The library had started as a passion project, not aimed to earn profits, but to benefit the community, and it will shut down keeping the same spirit in mind. Caro is giving away all their books at a nominal cost of Rs 50 per book and the proceeds from the sales will be donated to causes that the owners believe in.

To pay your last visit to the library or to grab a box of used books sold for cheap,contact Krishan at 9886183893.


Are you an East Bengaluru resident? We’d like to hear from you. email: anupama.bijur@timesgroup.com
https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/the-towns-mirror-special-sorry-cooke-town-the-library-is-closed/articleshowprint/85056420.cms?prtpage=1
bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-43
23518
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BYKVRLD6C3OCGBF5IBXUIVOJKUD2YAQF
<urn:uuid:a0408c66-f7da-4d20-9e04-e2b43f0ed20d>
2021-10-20T01:27:38Z
104.108.108.11
text/html
sha1:F5NIDHIFN2QEGCP5KRHGALOWYKP7BEAT
<urn:uuid:b1143d1b-12dc-4ed1-b7a1-d217df7245ea>
https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/the-towns-mirror-special-sorry-cooke-town-the-library-is-closed/articleshowprint/85056420.cms?prtpage=1
response
<urn:uuid:6f5d189b-7e5d-447a-98b0-248b06ec52e4>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-135
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/