Vasu Vijay Singh contributes as a Work Study Student with the Tavakoli Archives. Vasu is also currently a graduate student at the University of Toronto, pursuing a Masters of Chemical Engineering with an emphasis on sustainable energy and advanced manufacturing. Apart from academics, Vasu has an interest in history and folk music. Vasu works in the archive cataloguing Hindi and Sanskrit books and also helps out in the social media team at times.
“I have been a library assistant at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies since june 2023. In this role I have worked with the archive scanning team in the Archive project. In this role, I have mainly worked on scanning the hindi books that were present in the archive and in the bancroft office.
It has been exciting to work as part of a team at the Institute. Notably, I am most proud of being able to look at old vernacular and “lipis” of the hindi language and how it has evolved over time and the change in the slangs and proverbs used over time in the society. These experiences have taught me the importance of categorizing these books and studying them.
Further, I have personally benefited from my time with the Institute in several ways. I have developed and refined many important skills, including Archival scanning and handling of old books. These skills have enabled me to handle fragile books and categorize them. Combined with my other experiences, my time working at the Institute has enabled me to connect with such an amazing team of researchers and learn snippets of history based on the languages.
Overall, the Institute stands as an extremely important place of research and provides the people working there a wide array of old historical texts that are not easily available in general, making it important to note the amount of knowledge that needs to be studiued.”