nibedita chanda

“I want to be a librarian.”

The room fell silent.

The HR manager blinked twice. Hitesh thought she might have misheard him. Maybe she’d expected him to say “startup founder” or “tech consultant.” Anything but librarian.

“Do you mean opening a bookstore?” someone from the corner asked, half-joking.

“No,” Hitesh replied quietly. “A library.”

Sounds of confusion and mockery simmered through the conference room, the kind that isn’t cruel but still stings. He smiled politely. Tomorrow, they’d all move on — “colleagues” would become “ex-colleagues,” and his tech life would dissolve into memory.

Everyone thought he was wasting potential. Hitesh, the prodigy coder, the one who once fixed a server crash in ten minutes flat, was leaving to open… a library. The idea seemed absurd to everyone except him.

But that was alright. He’d spent enough years explaining himself.

When Hitesh was a child, he had a fascinating relationship with books. His father introduced him to the world of books, and since then, there was no looking back! He didn’t just read them — he lived inside them. Pages were his portals, paragraphs his playgrounds. His mother used to joke that if someone hid food inside a novel, Hitesh might finally remember to eat.

He was a voracious reader then — curious, wild, insatiable. But somewhere between school and adulthood, things shifted.

In college, his reading slowed. His buying didn’t. He became a collector of covers, authors, and the scent of new pages. He could spend hours in old bookshops, running his fingers along dusty spines like a pianist rediscovering keys. Once, an old bookseller had said, “You have a good eye for books.” he took that as a compliment. Though he didn’t know what that meant then. He just smiled and bought another. When he finally opened that very book — a philosophical memoir by some forgotten thinker — he read a few pages, sighed, and thought, It’s really good… but too deep for me right now.

It was only then that he realised — reading and buying books were two entirely different hobbies.

The night he decided to quit his fifteen-year career of coding technology, Hitesh sat cross-legged on the floor of his one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by piles of books. 

Most were unread, some halfread, only few finished. Some still had price tags. He stacked them carefully, like bricks for a home he was yet to build.

He had been sharp once (till he read), and brilliant in his long career. But now, he questions himself. His understanding of sharpness, intelligence and brilliance seems all blurry. He thought about intelligence — how the world measured it by degrees, paychecks, and promotions. But intelligence wasn’t just about solving algorithms or debugging code. It was about recognising hunger — not for success, but for meaning.

He looked at the pile of his prized possessions and whispered, “Maybe this is my real startup.”

Two months later, “The Quiet Corner” opened.

It wasn’t fancy — a rented room near the coffee shop, painted pale yellow, with mismatched chairs and secondhand shelves. No glossy ads, no apps. Just books and a hand-painted sign that read:

“For those who seek more than answers.”

At first, hardly anyone came. Sometimes, an old man stopped by to read the newspaper. A teenager borrowed a mystery novel and never returned it. A mother dropped in to escape the afternoon heat.

But Hitesh didn’t mind. He spent his days reading, cleaning, rearranging shelves, and jotting down thoughts in a worn notebook.

He wrote about how people fear stillness. How they equate silence with unproductivity. How the modern world worships motion — meetings, messages, metrics — but forgets the quiet art of reflection.

He once read that CEOs read an average of fifty books a year — not “how to succeed” manuals, but literature, history, philosophy. Workers, meanwhile, rarely read beyond job emails. “Maybe that’s why leaders lead,” he thought, “and followers just repeat.”

Books, to Hitesh, were not just objects. They were conversations with the wise souls, dialogues with the unseen. To read was to sit at a table with philosophers, scientists, and poets — all whispering, “We’ve been here before.”

One evening, a boy,  Aarav walked in. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, carrying a backpack that looked heavier than his frame.

“Is this a tuition place?” he asked.

Hitesh smiled. Kids nowadays don’t know much about libraries. “No. But it can teach you something.”

Aarav frowned, uncertain. Then his eyes landed on a stack of comics.

He picked one up. Sat down. Didn’t move for an hour.

When his mother came looking for him, Hitesh said, “Let him finish the story.”

That’s how it started — one boy, then another, then a group of students who came every week “just to chill.” Some enthusiasts began reading sessions only to continue the free hangouts, but slowly started sharing their understandings, and in no time began an official book-reading club.

Libraries are unique in their own way. Some come for silence, some for company.

Soon, people from the neighbourhood began donating books. Someone offered a projector. A retired teacher volunteered to host poetry readings.

Within a year, The Quiet Corner wasn’t so quiet anymore. It became a breathing space — alive, imperfect, human.

But not everyone was supportive.

His old colleagues sometimes messaged him: So, how’s your “library startup”?

He’d reply with a smile emoji. He didn’t mind their tone anymore.

Once, his ex-manager visited. She looked around, half impressed, half puzzled. “You could’ve made so much more money in tech,” she said.

“I’m making something else now,” he replied.

“What’s that?”

“Peace.”

She laughed. “You always were strange.”

Maybe. But strange people build sanctuaries in a burning world.

One rainy night, Hitesh sat by the window, the smell of wet earth and old paper mingling in the air.

He remembered his first job — the glass office, the glowing screens, the metrics dashboard that blinked green for success.

He remembered how empty he’d felt even on his best days. How praise had sounded hollow. How every achievement only demanded another.

Now, the silence hummed like music.

He wrote in his notebook:

We build careers like skyscrapers, but never check if the foundation is still human. We learn to code machines but forget to decode ourselves.

He looked at the shelves — books with worn spines, pages that smelled of thought.

He realised something profound — libraries aren’t about storing books. They’re about preserving pause. In a world that scrolls endlessly, a library invites you to stop.

And in stopping, you start again.

One morning, Aarav brought him a drawing that won him the second prize in his school drawing competition — a sketch of the library, full of stick-figure readers and speech bubbles. At the top, the boy had written:

“This place makes me think.”

Hitesh framed it near the entrance.

He felt proud. Maybe that’s what he’d always wanted — not to make products, but thinkers. Not to automate minds, but awaken them.

When asked now why he opened a library, Hitesh answers simply:

“Because somewhere along the way, I realised books make us infinite. Everything else just makes us efficient.”

And in that quiet room filled with stories — as light filters through the window, illuminating words on paper — he knows he chose right.

Because sometimes, the most radical thing you can do in a world obsessed with progress is to sit still… and read.