In my opinion, the libraries in Lucknow University are like a quiet pair of lungs in the environment, where the normal people of crowds, traffic, and political discourse cease to exist. As soon as one enters, they can feel the mood change, with people’s words being reduced to mere whispers, heated arguments vanishing, and a sense of sobriety being called for. That silence is not emptiness—it is a type of disciplinarity, which serves as a reminder that one still has to pay attention in order to learn. In a world full of distractions, libraries provide a moment of rarity, where one can still concentrate.
There is also a great value in what is stored on the shelves. Many of the texts are old and dog-eared and have been passed down over the years. The act of flipping through pages which your seniors read decades earlier is to be part of a long tradition of toil. The library is a democratic classroom—it is free and open to all. There is a chair and a table and self-control. For students who cannot otherwise afford additional learning facilities and tutors, such facilities are literally leveling. You share a seat with drive, not with prestige.
However, this is precisely where the admiration leads me to point out the deficiencies. Far too many books on the shelves have reached the point where they have outlived their usefulness.
Textbooks on economics that don’t refer to the Crisis of ’08, books on international relations that reflect a world before globalization, computer books predating contemporary operating systems—these books are no longer useful for research or learning. They are scattered and disorganized, with threading for pages that is held together by luck rather than design. A university library is supposed to be self-renewing—heatedly upgraded or transferred into digital form. Instead, it has been stagnant enough that parts of it have become museums for antiquated knowledge.
This divergence intensifies when we observe the preparation class of people who attempt competitive exams like UPSC. They utilize the library as a battle ground—long hours, NCERT books, polity notes, Laxmikanth, Spectrum, and newsheads lined up on a table. Their rigueur is commendable, and the libraries have strived to meet their requirements by allotting spaces for reading. These spots are mostly congested, poorly ventilated, and have no contemporary reference books. Theirs is a rapid, up-to-date, and international world; the library has a slow, local, and outdated one.
Cyber libraries were established to bring modernization in access, but their implementation in this regard is still half-hearted. Computers are there, but there’s minimal access to digital databases, research journals are almost out of bound, and internet resources, if available, are definitely not free. Today, research requires access to JSTOR, EPW, HeinOnline, SSRN, or e-libraries in their modern form, not just some free PDFs and some random Google searching. This makes it necessary for students to access knowledge that’s not attuned to the outside world’s rapid knowledge outputs.
The infrastructure adds to the problem—lighting is low, seating is uncomfortable for extended periods, conservation is lenient, and the ventilation requires more stamina than focus. During peak periods for exams, students hurry in early in order to “claim” their spot, causing a center for education to become a fight for seating. The library is meant to be more than a waiting room for Charbagh Station.
Beyond the physical concerns comes a cultural issue. Reading patterns tend to become a seasonal thing: jam-packed during the examination season, muffled during the periods when the desire to read should dictate otherwise. A library must not become a crisis center before the deadline but a habitat for intellectual meandering.
Nevertheless, even in the presence of these grievances, I hold an encouraging tone. Lucknow University has its own historical brilliance, space, and intellectual environment which has the potency to completely overhaul the whole library network. With proper investment in new books and advanced information and infrastructure, these silent zones could convert into international ambits of hope and aspiration. A university is ultimately judged by the minds it shapes. And minds are sharpened by access—not by nostalgia, but by access to knowledge, facilities, and unrestrained curiosity. Silence still reverberates in LU’s libraries. Now it needs funding to equal that silence.