I mean, co-incidences do happen. Like last week I thought I needed some peace and quiet, so I went for a walk in the North Midgard library. Its a narrow, cramped place, but it's the only place you can be sure there won't be the jabbering and chattering of juvenile delinquents around the NM campus. There, wandering through a particularly dusty section, I found a book called The Art of the Dancer nestled between two biographies of the founder of Reliance Industries.
I was...bewildered. For one thing, books like this were exactly the sort of thing calculated to give the trustees of NM violent coughing fits. Rooted as the Institute is in a culture of...well, having no culture..seeing a book that profiled exponents of as sublime and esoteric an art as the Ballet was quite a shock. It looked hurt and suffocated, the jacket, depicting Olga Spessivtzeva and Tamara Karasevina was torn and hurt. I grabbed the book from the shelf, (whence it jumped with an alarcity that suggested that Anna Pavlova had not found the company of Mr Ambani particularly pleasant) and flipped through the pages. It appeared well-written and well-researched. This book didn't just deserve to be read, it deserved to be rescued. But that, I well knew, was beyond my powers. Short of perpetrating Library Fraud, there seemed no way to really rescue the book. So I did the next best thing - issued it out, read it, and wrote a review up over at the other site. You can read it here
The book shall have to be returned tomorrow to its unfortunate place on the shelf. But maybe, just maybe, it will breathe again.
