It has been our firm belief for long, now reinforced by the present example that the festschrift volumes should be a tribute to the dead, or, at the most, presented in honour of those who have retired or about to retire from public life. A festschrift volume is perhaps too early for Professor Kaula by these standards. The editor in his introduction has called Professor Kaula a live wire. This is possibly the only thing right about appraisal of the man made in the introduction. Kaula is the most controversial person in the world of Indian librarianship. To call him ‘one of the most influential librarians in the world’ is an unpardonable exaggeration. The editor blazes an unhappy trail, thus denying to the readers an objective assessment of both strong and weak points of the subject of his too much adulation.
The fact of the matter is that Kaula embodies the extremes of Indian librarianship in which uncritical praise for the ideas of the late S.R. Ranganathan is combined with grudging reluctance to accept developments on the international scene and their relevance to Indian conditions.