Dr Sharda Kaushik: An English Language Expert

Sharda Kaushik is Professor and Head, Centre of Management and Humanities, Punjab Engineering College, formerly, Director, Regional Institute of English (RIE), Chandigarh, which deals in teacher education. At the RIE, she worked on various projects with the governments of Punjab, Haryana, HP, and J&K, with NCERT, UGC, EFLU, Hyderabad, British Council, New Delhi, RELO, US Embassy, New Delhi and Ministry of Education, Afghanistan among others.   

She studied for PGDTE from English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad. As a British Council Scholar she did MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Reading University, UK, and as a Fulbright Fellow, she did MS in Media Communications from Syracuse University, USA. She is a Ph.D. in English from Panjab University, Chandigarh.

She has been writing for newspapers regularly; for instance, she ran the column ‘Mind your Language’ in The Tribune for a year and has also sent short news features to CNN World Report. Besides the news features she has also made documentaries, one each for Door Darshan and Punjab Police.

Sharda Kaushik has published more than a dozen books with Macmillan, Orient Blackswan, Viva and Penguin among a few others. She co-authored the book titled Love in Four Languages with Lt Sardar Khushwant Singh. Apart from that, all her books are prescribed studies in universities, colleges and schools. She has extensively presented papers on Applied Linguistics at international and national conferences and published a few in leading journals in India and abroad.

Interview

Dr. Preeti Sharda: Please tell me something about your first encounter with the library.

Dr. Sharda Kaushik: The first encounter I had with the library goes back to my class 6th days in School, as till class 5 books were issued on our names and brought to us in the classrooms. I discovered two fascinating worlds; one of the encyclopedia for children my age then and the other of stories from Enid Blyton’s series of Five Findouters. A hill station girl with her knowledge confined essentially to local places, I was amazed to read about stalactites and stalagmites, rainforests, the pyramids, great inventions, all of them visually illustrated,  as also the adventures of crime detection and investigations by the five characters of Blyton’s mystery tales. I took the library to be an amazing co-parent/ co-teacher!

Dr. Preeti Sharda: How the library has made a change in your life?

Dr. Sharda Kaushik: The love for reading inculcated by the Sophia School library then has gradually seen me professionally become a scholar, a  professor, a researcher and a writer with rewards in the form of social and professional recognition, sponsored domestic and international travel, connections with an international community sharing common academic interests. At the personal level, my introduction to the Sophia School library and the subsequent desire to engage with books it has gifted me with has given me lifelong companions in the form of books. While some of those I read deserted me long ago, and I  abandoned many others, a few continue to live with me, even within me. Aldo, I always have a reliable friend in the form of one book or the other. And the best part is that the new ones keep extending my understanding of the world while lending warmth to my existence.

Dr. Preeti Sharda: How the library is important for people belonging to your profession?

Dr. Sharda Kaushik: The library is the core element, service, facility, call it what you may, for people in my profession. As knowledge and information is what we deal in, it is centripetal to our existence. We gain knowledge from it, we reorganise it, distribute it and advance it. 

No library means, no updates, no expansion. 

Dr. Preeti Sharda: What do you prefer more e-resources or print resources? 

Dr. Sharda Kaushik: It’s difficult to answer in a single word here. While I prefer books to be read at my own sweet convenience, I browse the e-resources a great deal for their easy and affordable availability, their vastness and their updates. So I need each of the two and am appreciative of the content more than the medium.

Dr. Preeti Sharda: What are your expectations from a library?

Dr. Sharda Kaushik: A library should be constantly upgrading itself. It should be easily accessible. It should be democratic in its duties and responsibilities, and not have an elitist bias at all. It should be affordable (many international journals are far too expensive), so there should be plenty for the readers. We as individuals and the government or the private sectors can never be considered to be over-investing in it; so far-reaching are it’s benefits. I have visited state libraries in the US who ask no questions on when you will return the books and whether you will. They assume if you are not reading them someone else is. I may not agree fully with the logic, but I appreciate the idea behind it.