Anita and Amit Vachharajani

Mixed nuts!

2012-01-17T21:30:00.000-08:00

as a boyfriend-starved college student, I knew one thing for a fact: the dreary Sahara desert of my lovelife was made more wretched by the fact that I had grown up going to an all-girls’ school. Boys were exotic creatures for us. We only met them inside the pages of books. In college, where they appeared in human form, we had no idea what to say to them.

While the co-educated girls seemed to make male friends easily, our little gang of girls-schooled late-bloomers found ourselves in fairly splendid isolation. We weren’t sad about it, of course, but we did conclude eventually that all-girls’ and all-boys’ schools were the earthly representations of hell. It was weird, because unlike the co-ed girls, we were actually very uninhibited, we laughed loudly, talked a lot; were witty, uncensored and hilarious. What we were not able to do, though, was have normal, relaxed friendships with boys. We swayed from being arch and flirtatious to completely stern and reproving.

My little girl goes to a mixed-sex or a co-ed school. One day, in Senior KG, she came home and told me that a boy had put his head on her lap and kissed her. Images flashed through my mind: Silsila. Rekha’s head on Amitabh’s lap. Mist. Flowers touching. Bees buzzing. Major coochie-cooing. I sat up with a start and asked my husband if I should go talk to the teacher about this Emraan-Hashmi-in-the-making. ‘No!’ replied the co-ed schooled man, ‘You’ll just traumatise the poor boy!’

Feeling traumatised myself I remembered my mother’s utter terror of co-eds and her dire warnings against sending her granddaughter to one. Mom went to a convent school and then studied engineering while staying in a girls’ hostel run by nuns. The Mother Superior there often warned them with these wise — and rather poetic — Malayalam words: ‘Whether a thorn falls on a grape, or a grape falls on a thorn, the grape is the one that gets hurt. So STAY AWAY from college boys.’ The story usually sent me into peals of laughter, but that day the thought of soft fruits and sharp objects terrified me.

Post that, there have been no romantic adventures so far and we have reached Class 2 without any need for major hysterics on my part. But I’m slowly beginning to wonder if mixed-sex education is the solution to the world’s ills that I had imagined it to be.

Studies show that co-education makes children conform to gender stereotypes — in the UK, for instance, girls in same-sex schools did better in Maths and Science, just as boys in same-sex schools did better in Languages. I personally feel that same-sex schools allow you to grow up without being sexualised too early.

We live in fairly frenzied times. The films and adverts our kids see are full of highly sexualised images of picture-perfect girls and women. Even on children’s channels, ads talk about milky, age-defying skin and tangle-free hair. I fear — perhaps without reason — that when you grow up in a co-ed, there’s going to be the added peer pressure of always appearing attractive to the opposite sex. Can you be yourself, gender-unstereotyped and, perhaps, un-cool?

Once when my daughter complained about a boy hitting her in class, I told her that I went to a school with no boys in it. Her eyes widened. ‘Reallllly??’ she squealed, ‘But WHY?’ Umm. Just. Then I asked her if she’d like to go to a school with only girls in it. Wouldn’t it be nice? No, she shook her head vehemently. ‘Boys are fun. Only girls would be boring.’ Interestingly, many studies show that overall, children in co-eds are under a lot less stress than their counterparts in same-sex schools. That must explain the ‘fun’ bit!

Less stress for the kids, no doubt, but probably much more for the parents! I know what I’m going to do for the next 10 years: sit in a corner, close my eyes and hold my breath till my kid finishes her ‘co-education’. Wake me up when it’s all over, dude.

This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Jan 15, 2012.

Magic by Any Other Name

2011-12-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

December. That time of the year when my little daughter’s sense of magic fights with her awareness of the real world – and loses. She comes from two generations of fairly laidback, irreligious, non-ritual-practicing people on both sides of the family, and is probably hard-wired to grow into a non-believer.

But all children need some magic in their lives. And by magic I mean that basic human urge to try and explain natural phenomena. Life. Death. How people were made. How the sun and moon were born. Or why cutting onions makes you cry. This need to explain – to basically create a beginning and an end for ourselves and our experiences – is a very human one. And perhaps it is the fount of all religious thought.

Both the thinner half and I had fairly non-religious childhoods. Our irrational cravings, therefore, are those inspired by the popular culture of our youth. Thanks to Linda Goodman, I can’t begin my day without reading my horoscope in three newspapers. The man saw E.T. in his childhood (an experience he is unlikely to let me forget) and probably because of that believes firmly in life on other planets.

But religion and ritual do offer great comfort. Ursula LeGuin nailed it when she wrote, ‘In our loss and fear we crave the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.’ When I am calmer, when someone I love isn’t unwell, I’m all scientific and agnostic. But it doesn’t take much to bring on that helpless feeling – a minor fall or an eye infection can terrify me. And then I’ll leap frantically across to the other side, promising coconuts, Saturday temple visits and Hail Marys.

Every now and then, I worry about my daughter not having a framework of belief to reach out to in times of distress. Then I drag her off to the temple. But since I can’t sustain the momentum, it falls slightly flat. She remains curious and watchful, but I can tell there’s very little real, emotional connect.

My mother, who life has badgered into non-belief, worries about this. Don’t ask me why. ‘Your child doesn’t believe in god!’ she says frantically, ‘Do something!’ I try not to remind her that she was the one who told the girl, at 4 years of age, that god didn’t exist, that temples and churches were just full of statues and pictures. At that time, my 26-year-old brother had just met with a fatal accident, leaving us hurt and bitter. It’s hard to always watch what you’re teaching a child.

When my kid lost her first tooth, I suggested the tooth fairy. She laughed at me. So I threw away all subsequent teeth. A year later, her friend lost her first tooth and got a gift from the tooth fairy. ‘There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy,’ mine declaimed. ‘I’ve lost so many teeth and never got a gift!’ The friend replied, ‘That’s because you don’t believe in the fairy!’

And that’s how she learnt, at 6, that sometimes it just pays to suspend disbelief, and hold out your hand. So the next tooth was saved, and the tooth fairy visited us. But Doubting Thomasina re-surfaced. Our long, hair-splitting discussions always ended with me saying helplessly, ‘Well, yes, she doesn’t exist, but if you want, you can think she does. And anyway, you got a gift, na?!’ Like my friend Hansa says, finally, chances are the only deity she'll believe in will be the tooth fairy!

Now it’s Christmas again, that time of the year when she scoffs, ‘There’s no Santa! I know it’s you only giving me gifts.’ This year, she said the same thing, but added with a smile, ‘Though, I don’t mind being a baby and believing in Santa for some time!’ She holds out a list of what she wants – four Secrets of Droon books, four Tintins, and, she adds, ‘a few surprises’.

Obviously there’s a Santa Claus. It’s just that she’s called ‘Mummy’!

This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Dec 4, 2011.

Just as an aside, the Santa Claus legend has its origins in Germanic and Dutch pagan lore. The pagan Sinterklaas became - via Odin (see b&w pic) and St Nicholas (see sepia-tone pic) - first the British Father Christmas (shown riding a goat) and then the American Santa Claus [thank you, wikipedia: In the British colonies of North America and later the United States, British and Dutch versions of the gift-giver merged further. For example, in Washington Irving's History of New York, (1809), Sinterklaas was Americanized into "Santa Claus" (a name first used in the American press in 1773)^[23] but lost his bishop’s apparel, and was at first pictured as a thick-bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe in a green winter coat. Irving’s book was a lampoon of the Dutch culture of New York, and much of this portrait is his joking invention.

The idea taken in by - what else - advertising and given a lovely, rotund, cheery image in a series of Coke advts from 1931 to the 1950s. Click on the link for more!

What Ramesh found...

2011-10-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

For years now, Ramesh has had my loyal custom. Back in the '80s, when I first spotted him outside Ambedkar Udyan, I was a humongously fat teenager, and he was a really thin young man in his 20s. He had strangely 'new' looking books. Unlike most street book sellers, he wasn't selling used books. His were all new, all titles that would - for sure - excite my young reluctant reader of a brother. I didn't know then that what he was doing then was selling the West's inventoried books - or books that are 'remaindered' in the warehouses, and are later auctioned off to distributors. Everyone in Mumbai has a favourite book guy. Ramesh, in Chembur, happens to be mine.

So The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Isaac Asimov's Futuredays (cigarette card representations of what people in fin de siecle France - 1899 - thought life held in store for the world in 2000; each card was wondrously illustrated and juxtaposed with a brief discussion of why it was plausible or not by Asimov. The best part - this me panting with excitement - was how he found the set of cards in a toy shop in Paris); the book of the movie Young Sherlock Holmes; and many more that I've forgotten about - and regrettably, lost.

Cut to 2001, Chakala, in deep dark Andheri East, walking around with Amit. I'm a lot less humungous, and we are crawling the lanes of our new-found suburb, trying to find something other than shops full of Chinese-made figurines to stare at. I see a book seller with books like The Animal of Farthing Wood and a series that has English being taught using Asterix comics. Delighted I look up at the seller, and whatdjaknow. It's Ramesh, plumper, older. We both grin and laugh and get down to the business of books.

2004, Chembur, and there's Ramesh again suddenly at his usual spot near Ambedkar Udyan. Friendship reaffirmed, we buy tons of books from him, and finally, give him lots of our pulp crime novels. We find copies of Hoot with him, and colouring books, and more novels, and more vintage children's books. Last week was a bonanza though. Look at all that he had for us!

The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco, the story of a Russian migrant whose mother and extended family make a quilt using old clothes belonging to relatives.
The quilt sees many generations of her family thru many rites of passage. Incidentally, this is a signed copy! Colour is used discretely - only to make the quilt sparkle. The b&w people are beautifully detailed.

Stone Soup by Jonathan Muth, an interpretation of the European folk trickster story. Muth sets it in China, and gives us some unforgettably minimal images.
Three monks reach a village. It seems sullen somehow. We are told that this is a village that often faces famine. The villagers are weary and wary. The adults keep to themselves. We meet the Scholar, the Seamstress, the Doctor, the Carpenter.
The tricksters attract a curious little girl in bright yellow, who follows them and is a via media to reach the villagers. She is a quiet and insidious counterpoint to the adults. Untouched by the knowledge of famine -and deprivation, she helps the strangers fetch more and more to throw into the pot.
And finally, that night, a grand celebration, where the soup is eaten.

Two of the books were on the American Civil Rights movement. The first is How four friends stood up by sitting down by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney

Four American college students went to the counter of Woolworths on February 1, 1960, and ordered coffee and a doughnut. They were never served. Integration and how it must have felt when it was still a churning, disturbing process make up the book's narrative. It's stirring because it resonates with so many other struggles - with Gandhi, Ambedkar, and how much the Dalit movement in our society still has to achieve in terms of equality of perception.

Henry's freedom Box by Ellen Levine is a story with positively luminous pictures. you can read more about the real Henry Brown here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Box_Brown. Strangely, though I didn't particularly want n to read the book, she curled up with it one afternoon. After reading it, her eyes twinkled when she described the underground train and how it wasn't really an underground train, just a train full of conductors and people who helped slaves escape. The illustrations are just incredible - rich, realistic, and lit with a strong, sad inner light.

The incredible book eating boy! by Oliver Jeffers about a boy who develops an apetite for books. He starts eating them accidentally - a pooping cat might have distracted him. Soon he becomes the smartest kid in sight with all those words inside him, and then, one day, he simply falls ill from eating too many books. He has to 'clean' himself up and takes to reading books, which, as the author says, is SO good. But sometimes, he falls off the wagon, so to say, and our lovely copy has bite taken off on the back cover to show you what happens when he regresses!

Coming soon - if our camera works - a picture of Ramesh :)

Forgiving mom and dad

2011-10-02T02:35:00.000-07:00

As a parent, there’s just one thing I’m totally certain of: no matter what you do, you’re wrong. You’re either too strict, or too lenient, or too nice or too nasty, too loving or too emotionally reserved.There’s more good news: you’ll only realise the complete error of your ways about 15 years from now, when you look back with hindsight, and see all the things you did that you shouldn’t have. Don’t ask me to prove this — I just know it the way a flower knows when to bloom, or the way we know that every year, come monsoon, Mumbai’s roads will feel like the surface of the moon.

You always start off with the hope of becoming your ideal of the best-ever parent — the best-pal parent, the pushiest parent, the most-free-spirited parent, etc. I aspired to be a combination of the parents I had plus the sort of parents I wished I had. After seven years of trying, I can freely admit to absolute, humbling failure. I had a wonderful role model in my mother, but turns out I’ve all her few faults and none of her virtues.

One of the things I know I’d love to give my child is the sense of freedom that my mum instinctively gave me. The feeling of total acceptance was the best thing about growing up in my family. I don’t remember mum ever laying down the rules or yelling at us (though her mother — my grandmum — more than made up for that).

But growing up with very few rules unfortunately leaves you unequipped for the harsher realities of life and work. So my totally inspired and unique plan was to raise my child with all the love and freedom my mum gave, plus a sense of discipline.

It didn’t quite work out. Turns out that I have my grandmother’s hissy tongue and temper, and her need for discipline, plus my own inherent laziness and indiscipline. And while I refuse to push my kid hard to succeed, I don’t have my mum’s true sense of laissez-faire either. I do however have her high levels of maternal anxiety. As Himesh Reshammiya once said: It’s Complicated.

As parents are we very different from our own? I think we spoil our kids more — we are wealthier, busier, and it’s easier to buy toys than to give kids time. In 15 or 20 years this will come back and bite us on our butts for sure. Unlike us, our parents were also a lot more secure about their methods. Whether they were beating us up or spoiling us silly, they did it with the firm conviction that they knew what was best for us. Or maybe it just seems that way now.Perhaps each generation of parents has to re-learn the skills of passing on the rules of living.

Sometimes parents succeed and raise happy, well-adjusted people, and others, well, don’t. I remember reading Philip Larkin’s (1922-1985) poem This Be the Verse, and going saucer-eyed at the eff word in it. I didn’t get it then, but now, with more perspective on what it is like to be both a parent and a child, I do.

In three very tight stanzas, Larkin spells out his bitterness:
They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

The poem becomes kinder towards parents in the second stanza — after all, he writes, they were screwed up by their parents too. The solution? Stop having kids and deepening the ‘coastal shelf’ of misery. Larkin’s advice doesn’t work because nature’s urge to multiply is — thankfully — stronger than good poetry.

Sometimes I think the greatest lesson we can teach our children is how to be kind - so that when they grow up, they can look back at our mistakes with a large measure of forgiveness!

(This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Oct 2, 2011, in my column called 'Small Blunders'.)

Interviewed by the Timeout!

2011-09-26T20:53:00.000-07:00

Found in Translation
What kind of stories do children find appealing? Strong narratives, arresting visuals and irreverent ideas are crucial, according to children’s writer Anita Vachharajani. Gijubhai Badheka’s Gujarati folk tales not only meet these criteria, but like most folk tales, are also a combination of the absurd, the philosophical and the fun. A contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi, Badheka wrote a variety of children’s stories, which were later retold and illustrated in Hindi by author, painter and cartoonist Aabid Surti. Associated with children’s publishing since 1998 and author of children’s books Amazing India and Nonie’s Magic Quilt, Vachharajani has translated Badheka’s folk tales into English that include a set of two books titled The Phoo-Phoo Baba and other Stories (Volume I) and Uncle Know-All and other Stories (Volume II). She has used both Badheka’s and Surti’s texts for the English version. In an e-mail interview, Vachharajani tells Shinibali Mitra Saigal that folk tales show kids how “sense and nonsense can be tossed together for fun.”
What prompted you to translate Gijubhai’s Gujarati folk tales?
My husband Amit is a Gujarati, and he introduced me to these folk tales. Gijubhai was an educationist who propagated freedom and love as being central to the process of learning. I translated some of Gijubhai’s nonsense verse for The Tenth Rasa: The Penguin Book of Indian Nonsense Verse, edited by Michael Heyman. Later, the editors at Pratham Books asked me to translate Aabid Surti’s Hindi re-tellings of Gijubhai’s stories. I worked with both the Gujarati and the Hindi texts.

Which was your favourite Gijubhai story in the collection and why did you like it? Each one was a discovery. The one I had the most fun with was Uncle Know-All. It's about an old know-it-all who lords over a village of fools and the bizarre nuggets of wisdom he doles out. It had a really weird and completely irreverent feel .

What is more difficult? Writing an original story or translating one? Both are challenging. When one translates, one has to make sure that the text lives and sparkles in the target language as well. In an original story, you can take the narrative where you want to, whereas in a translation, your path is more or less decided for you. Your job is to make that path as rich and joyous as possible.

Can you always retain the subtle nuances of the original? You do lose some nuances. It’s inevitable. But you aim to capture the spirit of the original, without becoming heavy or pedantic. Also, even as you lose one set of nuances, you create others. Since I had both the Hindi and the Gujarati texts to work with, I could see that each version was slightly different. It’s an intuitive process and every re-teller of a story – especially in the folk tradition – makes choices and decisions to suit his or her style. Gijubhai himself was re-telling some of these stories, and you can sense that the language – informal, chatty – is entirely his own.

Do you think knowledge of folk tales will disappear if they are not translated into English? Unless we make a legitimate and viable space for folk art, it will be sidelined with time. As for our stories, we must keep telling and re-inventing them in new contexts to keep them alive. Re-telling a story in multiple languages takes it to a new audience, and that’s an exciting thought, as so many more people can read it.

The Phoo-Phoo Baba and other Stories (Volume I) and Uncle Know-All and other Stories (Volume II), Pratham Books, Rs.40.
Appeared in the Timeout of Sept, 2011

It takes a village... even to have fun!

2011-09-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

Was the world a better place when I was growing up? Life was harder, for sure. Mom was an office-goer, grandma was strict, teachers were sticklers, and worst of all, TV had one black-and-white channel where the highlight was aapan yanna pahilat kaa - a show that listed out names and descriptions of missing people. If we were really lucky, we caught the fleeting, animated Amul ad.
My daughter has it easier - freelance, stay-at-home parents; a choice of wildly similar cartoons and reality shows on TV; and apparently, a liberal academic system. What does she lack that I had? I guess the answer is friends. Friends who live nearby and are just one loud, afternoon-nap-ruining yell away. We had this growing up - friends who were always ready for play, fights, trips to the corner shop and sharing comics.
Now we live in a neighbourhood of low-rises, where all the young people have left, following jobs that take them to where other young couples - and their kids - are. We live among retirees and are indisputably the only people of child-bearing age around. Our kid, therefore, has no playmates.
In fact, our neighbourhood is so kid-free that BMC’s Pulse Polio staff took a long time to figure out that we existed and needed reminders and booster doses. This may make no sense to the un-kidded among you, but those with kids know that the Pulse Polio people are the most dedicated sniffer-outers of children under five. It took them time to find us, and that is saying a lot. When they found us, they shook their heads in wonder and said, ‘Kisko maloom tha ki iss building mein bhi bachche hai...’
So we started taking baby to the garden. The few kids who turned up there were a floating population. The only permanent people were the grannies, and though our child loved playing with the arthritic old ladies, it was obvious that she needed peers.
Young couples with kids automatically seem to gravitate towards the newer gated complexes, and since we couldn’t move to one of those, playdates seemed like a solution. But fixing up ‘appointments’ for toddlers is an insanely awkward and pointless exercise. Firstly, it’s not like you’re walking into the neighbour’s place for a game of ‘house-house’. So it’s not casual. The moms and dads have to like and ‘approve of’ each other. Then schedules have to be discussed and tweaked. It all begins to feel way too strained, artificial, and too much like work.
What I wanted was for my kid to have a village of her own. A set of friends to play, fight and gossip with every day. Children need to build relationships outside the comfort zone of families, so that they understand the dynamics of social intercourse. This knowledge is so important that most tribal societies have formal spaces like youth dormitories and age-sets to foster it.
Just when I was about to give up hope, I met an old schoolmate in the garden, who generously said, “Come play in our building, there are many kids.” So I located her building, about eight streets away from us, full of young people, their kids, and their friends’ kids. A small oasis of 25 children! Presto, my daughter had her village, albeit a bit further from home than I liked.
At first, playing with peers was difficult for her. So far her playmates had been obliging adults. Children are instinctively not polite or obliging to one another - with them, you have to, like in the jungle, earn your stripes. So every evening would end in a fight and her howling loudly, and yet, come the next evening, she wanted to go back.
Some time later, in a shop, she picked out a yellow Tantra t-shirt which said: ‘Friends are better than TV’. Maybe she just fancied the colour, but I like to imagine that she was trying to say something.

This article appeared in the DNA dated Aug 28, 2011.

The Big, Fat Indian Birthday

2011-07-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

In the six-odd years that I have been chaperoning my kid to birthday parties, I’ve figured that party-wise, there are broadly two kinds of city parents: those who approach their kids’ birthday parties with the same determination that soldier-ants take to gathering food, and those who, like the grasshopper in the folktale, simply outsource the stress.

The soldier-ant-type of parent (mostly the mother) frets, plans and slogs for the birthday party, tearing out her hair and getting irritable bowel syndrome in the process. Fathers are usually assistant-sloggers, perfect for random running around and sacrificing their pollution-weakened lungs to blow balloons.

The grasshopper-type parent, meanwhile, hands it all over to a new breed of professional — the event manager. Mum and dad make phone calls, sign a few cheques, and go for a film or a pedicure. The event manager gets everything from food and ‘games’ to return gifts.

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It’s weird, but both the grasshoppers and the soldier-ants take pride in their distinct parties. Stoically, the soldiers flaunt their small, home-made, parent-driven parties. The grasshoppers meanwhile take pride in the fact that their kids’ birthdays are large-scale, ‘exciting’ and more importantly, managed by the hired help. I’d like to state here that I’m a soldier-ant-mum, and I have my husband’s fatigued lungs to prove it.

Growing up in the ’70s, for us a birthday party meant paper plates, chips, a sandwich and a slice of lurid-looking cake. It meant money in an envelope pressed into the birthday kid’s hand. It meant some noise, some Rasna, and ok-tata-bye-bye. But in the Noughties, in globalised India, if it doesn’t hurt the wallet, it’s not just worth it.

Five parties out of the 10 we attend have one or more of the following:

a bouncy castle which teeters close to the sky and looks downright scary
glittery, eco-unfriendly, thermocol banners featuring sundry Disney Princesses/Spiderman/Ben 10 ‘cartoons’ which are supposed to define the party’s theme
a young college student with an accent straight out of an Andheri East call centre as the Master of Ceremonies — my daughter calls this person ‘the manager’
rehearsed performances by the birthday kid’s older sisters/cousins, featuring highly-sexualised Bollywood numbers — you cringe, but since the parents look like their child has just ended world hunger, you nod and say, ‘Verrrry nice…’
a magic show (with frightened rabbits/doves) + a tattoo artist + a caricaturist + a hair braider-and-colourer (horrible chemical colours on your child’s head, but never mind)
games that make your toes curl. Like ‘pick the dad with the biggest paunch’ or asking the birthday kid’s father to choose the best dancer among the assembled mummies, who obligingly shimmy for him

Recently, at a 4-year-old boy’s birthday party, after the professional clowns had romped on the stage, we were in for a hitherto unseen treat. The ‘manager’ invited the headmaster of the child’s playschool to ‘say a few words about the birthday boy’. The guests’ jaws dropped in unison. Listening to a speech in praise of someone who has just stepped out of diapers is a mildly surreal experience.

Then there are the return gifts. Caboodles of plastic crap, made in the dark by-lanes of Shenzhen, China. The bags, folders, water-bottles, tiffin-boxes and melamine-laced plate-and-spoon-sets are all given to kids who don’t really need more stuff. A rare, brave parent will sometimes risk popularity and give out potted plants or books.

It’s all meant to feel like a carnival, I guess, a mindless motion of money and ‘enjoyment’. In a perfect world, a birthday party wouldn’t be that, I think. It would mean experiencing something new and life-changing, something that truly celebrates a milestone. Learning about fish or butterflies, going to a farm, a nature walk or a fun session at the museum, or discovering a craft together. Till that happens, let’s aim at less wasteful, more conscious and aware birthday parties.

It’s a dirty job, but some-mum’s got to do it!

This appeared in the DNA of Sunday, July 24, 2011

New books - published by Pratham!

2011-07-09T22:08:00.000-07:00

written in 2001, the idea for this story was suggested by amit. then he worked with me to whet it, and later gouri worked on it a lot (special, special thanks for her editorial genius and patience). i sent it to puffin, where sayoni basu at puffin liked it, and though they didn't publish it finally, sayoni pulled me into a lot of fun projects - like the puffin book of bedtime stories, and the tenth rasa.
ambili is a much-travelled story, and finally, she found her form and her book at pratham, where manisha chaudhary was kind enough to choose to publish her! venkat raman singh shyam drew and painted her, in his lovely, restful style... so here she is, in her own story, ambili meets the king!
i love that the idea came from a gujju, was written by a mallu, illustrated by a pardhan gond artist from madhya pradesh...

giju bhai again, is someone i met thru amit and we worked with his folk nonsense in the tenth rasa too. after translating poetry for the tenth rasa, i really wanted to try some prose. then i met sampurna murti of pratham, and turns out they were thinking of translating giju bhai's stories - thru a hindi re-telling of them illustrated by aabid surti.
it was an exciting project, as i worked with both versions - aabid bhai's and giju bhai's. during this project, amit also chanced upon the gujarati giju bhai version he had read as a child, illustrated by aabid bhai!
so here the two volumes are, full of some of the nicest, cheeriest folk stories. and filled with aabid bhai's funny drawings. hope you find them near you people, or else look up their site. you could order online or find a store near you using their store locator.

Of sleeping and swearing

2011-06-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bull***t. Stop lying.
Lie the **** down, my darling, and sleep…

Not my lines, but lord, I wish they were. Novelist Adam Mansbach, exhausted with his daughter Vivien’s refusal to sleep, wrote the hilarious, cathartic poem Go the **** to Sleep. While its gentle rhymes and brilliant illustrations (by Ricardo Cortés) make it look like a picture book, it is definitely not to be read to your child. Not unless you want her to grow up with the vocabulary of a truck driver. Because this best-selling ‘children’s book for adults’ is about a father swearing at his child’s reluctance to fall asleep.

I can see your raised eyebrows from here. The thing is, till you have tried to put a reluctant child to sleep, you have NO IDEA how tough it can be. Most young parents learn — the hard, humbling way — that kids have their own body clocks. In two years or so you recognise this, and officially give up hope. You may have dinner plates to wash or a cure for cancer to invent or your limbs may be falling off from sheer exhaustion. But baby won’t fall asleep till he wants to. There are still so many toes and fingers to play with, and so much of your hair to pull. It’s enough to make you want a village to raise your child with!

Sleep patterns vary. Some kids sleep at 8pm and wake up shiny-faced at 6am. Some young debauches bounce off the walls till 12am and then crash, only to come around at about 10am the next day. Mine sleeps late and wakes up early. At 11.45 in the night, when my eyelids droop shut in the middle of some story she is telling me, she pulls them apart so that I can listen to her more attentively. At an obscene 6.45am, she’s up again (only on holidays) having remembered some crucial detail she forgot last night.

I have realised that sleep deprivation is a fairly refined device of torture. A friend’s mother who had two kids in quick succession spent the next few years waking up at night for this one’s feeds and that one’s pee. She thought she would never ever sleep again, that her life would pass by in a miasma of tired un-sleptness. The frustrated sense that Mansbach calls ‘…being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again...’ Imagine, then, having twins or triplets.

As kids grow, their exploration of the day’s stimulus becomes more verbal. My kid isn’t obsessed with her toes now; she has questions. How did cavemen have babies — there were no doctors to cut their tummies open? Why we have skin? Why are kids mean in class? Why are you mean to me? Can I be an actress? A dancer? Do taps need electricity? I know that the kind thing to do is to retire early, giving her the time to talk through her thoughts. But life has this way of making bhartha out of my best intentions, and invariably bedtime is a tug-of-war between my ‘Go-to-sleep!’ and her ‘Amma-one-last-thing!’

One of our unforgettable bedtime discussions featured the question ‘What are fathers for?’ To look after you, I say, yours feeds and bathes you, no? Frustrated, she sits up. ‘No, I mean before that — the mummy carries the baby inside her stomach. What is the daddy for?’ So she’s talking biology, I’m talking sociology. And to save myself time, I’m being thick too.

God knows I’m not shy of discussing anatomy. But late at night, sleep and chores tugging at my mind, I want to quote Mansbach, be a bad parent and say, ‘No more questions. This interview’s over…’ Go the bleep to sleep, kid!

This article first appeared in the DNA of Sunday, June 19, 2011

Swapping stories and postcards!

2011-05-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

We took part in Zoe Toft's International Postcard Swap this year. It was a way to get n excited about her drawing and her copious reading - as this vacation had us pretty sadly under-engaged, what with her chicken pox and my bad back. She drew about 7 really lovely postcards (including the 'potatoe monster' who 'eats dishes' above) and had great fun choosing from among her books, and then re-reading all her favourite - and sometimes forgotten - books.

So this was our list:
Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr Seuss, illustrated by Roy McKie. An elegant and hilarious read. N has long given up on picture books and beginner readers, but every now and then, she sneaks back to them, looking inside for fun. We found this one in Pondicherry, and I was going to gift it away till I caught her reading and re-reading it, and chortling into her chin. When we spoke about recommending books, this was one of her first shouts!

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang. another total favourite of n's. just loves loves loves this wordless books, even going back to it repeatedly. Molly bang, wherever you are, you have two hardcore fans in India. More about how we got the book here.

The BFG by Roald Dahl. Her first proper big novel. Finished all 200 pages of it last month, using a bookmark and feeling extremely serious. loves it to madness, esp the bits about how people from different parts of the world taste different! ('people from india taste of ink!') She found the giant's names and their specific 'tastes' in kids too funny. wanted to make a play of it, with herself as sophie (what a surprise, i say!)

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise brown - a long-forgotten read, was happily pulled out because we got a 2-yr-old and a 3-yr-old in our list. a very sweet, calming read, and used to be our bedtime story for a bit.

Pete's a Pizza by William Steig. It's raining outside, Pete cant go to play. He has these rather elderly parents or grandparents with him, who look at him calmly and proceed to make a pizza out of him, using checkers, paper pieces, talcum powder and liberal amounts of tickling. When the sun comes out, Pete walks off. All very wry and unsentimental and great fun.

Nonie's Magic Quilt by You-know-who. How could n resist recommending a book about herself? We sent Rose, from France, a copy of the book too!

On the Way Home by Jill Murphy, about a little girl who can't resist telling a reeeeally tall tale. I was surprised to find n wanting to recco it bec its been a while since she last read it. But it's a really mad, lovely book.

The Why-why Girl by Mahashweta Devi. I was insistent that we recco more Indian books, but managed to get only two in. This is one of n's favourites and she has it in marathi and in english. it's a story about a tribal girl and the life she lives, told with an unusual lightness... I do hope the family manages to find a copy!

Tuesday by David Wiesner - surreal and scary, it's a wonder that most kids love this book as much as adults do. a quiet swamp, floating frogs, puzzled fish and hardboiled detectives. what more could a kid ask for in a book?

Thinking Thepla, Eating Idli

2011-05-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

If you marry someone from another ethnic group in India, two things could happen. Either your parents never talk to you again, or, if they are nice, normal people, they mutter hopeful homilies like, ‘Children of inter-caste-marriages are always very clever…’ Luckily, it’s a while before you learn about the realities of living with differences. As a Malayalee married to a Gujarati, I could tell you a bit about this.

Finally, it all comes down to food and drink. Mallus believe that drinking hot water boiled with jeera, dhania or sunth in summer actually cools the body down. I never drank ice-cold, fridge-water at home, growing up. Once, around 5, I mistook a small bottle of white vinegar for water, grabbed it and drank deep before anyone could stop me. If they saw me, they'd take away the bottle, I knew. My lips turned blue, mom says, but I refused to let go of that bottle. Somehow, in Kerala, anyone wanting to drink ice-cold-water is morally weak and just asking for a sore throat. For the first year of our marriage, the fridge was a silent war zone. He would put in bottles of water, I would take them out. It seemed wrong somehow, to be serving cold water at home. I mean, whatever next? My mum still doesn’t get why her son-in-law blanches at the Malayalee summer cooler: hot, pale-yellow, jeera-infused water.

Perhaps it’s because he’s from Kathiawad, where drinking cold water feels like a minor religious experience. In summer, my mother-in-law freezes vatis of boiled water and then tosses the little bowls of ice into a large vessel of boiled-and-cooled water. Guiltily, I drink glassfuls, while looking around furtively for a yelling adult. The fridge wars have ceased.

Likewise, breakfast in a Mallu house is serious business, with idli, dosha, upma or appam. In a Gujju house, breakfast is the time you kill, munching homemade naasta before a delicious hing-and-gur-tinged lunch. When the sun sets, you want to eat light, and it’s time for a ‘prograam’. A bhel, bhajiya, dhokla or paani-puri no prograam. I watched awe-struck as the elderly polished off fried snacks for dinner. If I gave a Mallu father-in-law bhajiyas for a meal, he’d go nuclear on me. Diabetes! Acidity! Filial brutality! Stuffing my face, I worried about being able to conjure up similar whatnots when the in-laws visited us in Mumbai. Obviously, a square meal just wouldn’t do.

Then there are the specific food-group-related hysterias. Featuring — in our case — rice and proteins. We Mallus like our proteins caught, killed, cooked in kilos of cokennut and served with red rice. To most Gujjus, proteins = dals, which are eaten with rotlis, and not with rice (simply too starchy, no? Not healthy - say the people who mainline deep-frieds).

We found all of it hilarious — till baby arrived. Then the battles-lines were drawn. Rice versus wheat. Oil baths versus just baths. Ragi versus rava. Dal-paani versus rice-kanji. Green bananas versus yellow bananas. Picking-a-name-off-the-top-of-your-head versus naming by rashi. Rubbing a stick made of scented herbs with a bit of gold inside it and giving the baby a drop of the paste (Mallu colic cure) versus fainting at the suggestion (Gujju reaction).

And food-group hysteria again. My mother-in-law implored, ‘Dal is the best protein, no need for non-veg!' And then, seeing I was determined to raise an omnivore, the poor lady got to her specific fear. 'At least don’t give her pig-meat!’ My mother, meanwhile, felt duty bound to enquire, ‘Why haven’t you started fish-chicken for this child still?’ Meanwhile, the fruit of my womb calmly refused Mallu staples like chicken, fish, steamed yellow bananas, jackfruit and rice kanji. She seemed predisposed to sev-gaanthiya, pasta, paneer, pijja, noodles, and still needs her daily Gujju staple: dal-bhaat-shaak-rotli.

Growing older makes you hanker for the ways of your childhood. It makes you want to reclaim some of the past, by teaching your kids things you picked up unconsciously from your parents. I sometimes imagine a family where everybody drinks warm jeera-water and enjoys dried-fish pickle. My husband probably dreams of a home where chhunda is made in summer and methi theplas are made in winter. However, despite our occasional longings for the familiar, it is with the unknown, the different, that we are charting a course. It’s a bit rocky, but it’s fun too.

Our mixed-up ‘Gujyalee’ or ‘Mallurati’ kid will, hopefully, find her own path through the minefield of her parents’ combined nostalgia. If she ever marries, though, I hope she goes all out on a limb. Brings home a son-in-law who grew up eating boiled whale blubber or pickled goat intestines.

The more different the better, I say.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, May 15, 2011

Drop me a Postcard!

2011-05-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

Described as the Best British Children’s Literature Blog by the School Library Journal, a pre-eminent online magazine for American Libraries, Playingbythebook.net is written by Zoe Toft. The 37-year-old mother from the UK is a trained linguist and a self-confessed lover of dictionaries. She reviews picture books with her children, and, interestingly, builds each review around an activity inspired by the book. For instance, when Toft reviewed my book, Nonie’s Magic Quilt, she merged it with a description of making a quilt for her daughter.

In 2010, Toft had an unusual idea. “We love receiving ‘proper’ mail, and wanted to participate in an online postcard swap,” she says. “There were many swaps, but none that the kids could enjoy. So I thought up a swap where every postcard would include a children’s book recommendation, because sharing a favourite book is a concrete way of making a connection. I hope to hold the swap every year. I don’t want to make the world any smaller, but I think it’s important we feel connected to each other.”

The swap is structured so that each family sends postcards to five families across the world. In turn, they receive postcards from five different families (not the same ones that they sent postcards to). The postcard can be printed or drawn, with a note recommending a favourite book. Effectively, the families find a window into each other’s lives, and share about 10 book suggestions among them. Toft says, “You can suggest the same book to all the families or – ideally – a different book to each. People often tailor their suggestions keeping in mind the recipient’s age.”

Toft’s first postcard swap in 2010 brought together over 250 families from far-flung places: Alaska, Argentina, Brunei, Bulgaria, Israel, Marshall Islands, Pakistan and Poland. “The toughest part is pairing up people, making sure everyone receives families from five different countries, with children of similar ages. The reward is hearing about the little connections they make. People who come back every year will be paired with different families.” After the 2010 swap, many families went on to become penpals.

During the swap, Toft “met” many people, including Sandhya L., a Bangalore-based writer for Saffrontree.org. Sandhya’s family sent cards to the UK, US, Singapore and Spain. Her daughter “was delighted to receive letters addressed to her. One came from the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean! In these days of instant communication, it was exciting to get post.”

Another new friend was homeschooling mom Bronwyn Lavery of Christchurch, New Zealand. Lavery says, “I set up a world map, marking the locations of families we connected with. I told my kids about the great distance each card would travel. We loved sharing our favourite books and searched for books that others recommended.”

And connections had indeed been made. When Christchurch had a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in April 2011, Toft got in touch with Lavery and heard that many families had lost their homes. Together, they paired families around the world with those in Christchurch, and, “Thanks to the kindness of strangers, we sent 565 books into welfare centres and care packages as well, so that the families would have something to enjoy as they rebuilt their lives.”

Click here to find out more about the International Postcard Swap for Families. Or email zoe.toft@kuvik.net. The last date to register is May 17.

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Mint of Friday, May 6, 2011, to see it on the page, click here: http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/05220037/Drop-me-a-postcard.html?h=C

Art, within and without lines

2011-04-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

In the long-forgotten past, I worked in a publishing house. With actual adults, politics, a cafeteria, and real gossip. But before I start weeping at those fond memories, let me move on to the one that inspired this article. Colouring books. Full of perfect, pre-drawn pictures, colouring books were our main money-spinners, and their status as such was sacrosanct.

Once, feeling a bit wild — or unwell maybe — I suggested doing an open-ended sort of art-and-activity book for children. Not the kind where the kid colours a smiling mouse, but one where she is encouraged to apply her mind as well. So you have, say, a tiger with a thought bubble, and the child has to figure out — and doodle — what the tiger might want to eat. Shooting Nazar-suraksha-kavach-type rays of condescension my way, the boss said, ‘Why parents buy activity and colouring books? So that children will do timepass. Not so that children will ask them what to draw.’ Point noted. I shut my gob.

Ten years later, working with kids has shown me that art can and should be seen only as a method of self-expression in children. Any adult intervention should be at the level of acting as a facilitator or trigger — and nothing more. To take joy in colours and explore materials should be the primary focus, rather than acquiring the ‘skills’ associated with making perfect pictures. Skill-based art classes — madly popular right now — teach kids 4 to 6-years-old how to draw and colour ‘well’. They come out making pretty pictures no doubt, but their natural and delightful uninhibitedness is pretty much ironed out of them.
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Try saying the words ‘colouring books’ to my otherwise mild-mannered-artist husband, and he will break into a taandav and rip your head off. These seemingly-innocent books — or the spawn of Satan as he calls them — meet two key parental desires: perfection in the child’s ‘performance’, and secondly, quiet engagement, or ‘timepass’. Like the classes, they leave no room for open-endedness, imagination and self-expression. They also pass on a subtle signal to kids: drawing is grown-up’s work, and should not be attempted by you. You just colour. Neatly and within the lines.

So as a toddler, our kid was only given paper, paints, water and brushes. She messed around like Jackson Pollock on steroids. Skills, her father said, could be taught later. We were entirely smug about this till she returned bawling one day from pre-school. Colouring a printed picture within the lines had her flummoxed. Given colours and paper, she scribbled, rubbed, crushed, had fun. Unlike most kids in her class, she had never seen a colouring book and didn’t know that you couldn’t — at 4 — let your crayons stray.

It took a long time for that particular penny to drop. Colouring within the lines may be an artistically pointless pursuit, but to educationists, colouring with fat crayons is a good way to teach children better finger-control. Sighing at our over-reaction, we quietly went out and bought colouring books. Gradually — with her kind teacher’s help — our child ‘caught up’ with her friends. Humble pie is delicious when the alternative is a teary child.

Now that she’s older, like others her age she draws stuff and builds stories around it. Silly, strange vignettes that probably pop into the head as the hands move (and her artistic tantrums are part of the package too, her friends’ mothers tell me). We’ve also discovered the Japanese artist Taro Gomi’s delightful doodling books. Open-ended and thought-provoking, they don’t just make time pass, they make it fly like Rajnikant on 3G.

It’s cruelly ironic that though we don’t send her to art tuitions, she shamelessly picks up colouring tips like ‘shading’ from the art-tuition-going-kids at school. As an adult she’ll probably write about her kanjoos, oppressive parents who wouldn’t send her to art class at 4 and how deprived she felt about it.

Too bad. We’ll survive that, I hope!

(this article first appeared in the DNA of April 17, 2011)

Passing on the book bug

2011-04-18T04:22:00.000-07:00

When I tell people that I write children’s books they usually imagine that I am:
1.As rich as Croesus from all the royalties my kindly publishers send me.

2.If not, then at least as rich as J K Rowling. I mean, at least.

3.If not rich, then surely living in a world full of sweet peppermint twists, where unicorns of joy regularly gambol at my feet.
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It’s fun to disabuse people of these charming notions.

They blanch on hearing about some of the ogres in publishing, and when I tell the average Shining Indian Yuppie how much children’s writing actually pays, the silence is deafening.

There’s a fourth notion that some people — mostly mums with streaked hair and big bags — have about people who write books for children. This is the one where they imagine that writers must know enough practical magic to be able to whiz a video-game-and-mall-obsessed child into an avid reader — overnight, at the age of say 9 or 10 years. Easily done, no? Well, er, no.

When parents tell me ‘My kid doesn’t read, what to do?’ I usually ask them if they read. Some laugh out aloud at the quaint notion of themselves as readers, while others look thoughtful and ask if I meant Chicken Soup for the Parent’s Soul. When I say ‘No,’ they reply cheerfully, ‘Then no, I don’t read. But I’d reeeallly like my kid to read!’

So I explain that to inspire their kids to read, they need to get excited about reading themselves. They look shattered. Obviously I should have said something sensible like ‘Soak three newspapers overnight, blend and pour into a purple glass and then pour into your child’s mouth while holding his nose shut and praying to the sun. You can be sure that he will begin reading on the sixth day!’

Unfortunately, human beings are essentially apes, and we learn by imitation. Little apes watch grown-up apes to figure out what is edible and what is not, what is to be loved and what is not. So if parents value shopping, video games and trips to the mall above all other activities, chances are their kids will too. If parents love football and hiking, chances are their kids will too. And typically, if parents read, chances are, their kids will read too.

I personally worry that reading too much makes kids introverted. Sometimes I feel it lets them get their life-experiences second-hand. But that’s probably because my kid reads. I would rather she were sporty and physical, but she has grown up watching her mother read while lounging around, cooking, eating, and even while trying to fall asleep. Father is same-to-same, with the added feature that he also reads on the pot. It would be pointless for me to despair at the fact that she doesn’t run or swim fantastically well, and regards the act of climbing trees with suspicion. But she reads everything, everywhere — all sorts of books, in the car and on the pot. Apples have this nasty habit of falling close to their trees.

So yes, mums-and-dads, the only thing that will get your kid excited about books is you getting excited about them. If you don’t read but genuinely want your kid to, here are some suggestions: buy interesting, age-appropriate books, and read them out to your child. If he or she is too young to get the ‘reading’, then tell the tale. Dramatically, with a sense of fun. While keeping a watch out for signs of engagement and/or boredom. Talk about books, spend money on buying them (yes, that is key) — you could, like us, also trawl through secondhand stores. While your jaw might lock with boredom, chances are your kid might get into a reading habit.

And who knows, maybe it’ll make a happy reader out of you too!

(this article first appeared in the DNA of Mar 27, 2011)

Pressure-Cooked Kids

2011-03-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which I reviewed for the DNA some weeks back, is causing a sharp intake of breath among educationists everywhere. The book is about her life as a hysterical over-ambitious parent, and what disturbed me, personally, is that she is not the only one out there.

Whether it’s Ms Chua in America, or Mrs Rao in Matunga, pushing kids to ‘reach their potential’ begins much earlier these days. Moms I meet at school look at me like I just crawled in from under a particularly grimy rock when I tell them that my 6-year-old has only just begun to learn basketball and music. I can see their antennae quivering: Neglectful Mom Alert!

One lady has been ‘showing’ her kid books of maths tables from the time he was 3; put him in Abacus classes by 4; ‘piano’ or keyboard classes (yes, it’s not just the humble ‘Casio’ anymore) by 4.5; and of course, chess by 5. Another, the mom of a 7-year-old musically gifted child, takes him for Hindustani, Carnatic, and ‘piano’ classes on alternative days, after he’s done seven hours at school. Being excessively liberal, she says, ‘If he finds it too much, I have told him to tell me.’ Yeah, right. See, kids live to please the adults in their lives. Practically everything is acceptable because they don’t know of alternatives. That’s why we, as parents, need to calm the heck down.

Among the favoured classes these days are ‘phonetics’ (doesn’t matter that the term is wrongly used), grammar, tuition, dance, music, Abacus, Vedic Maths, story-telling, creativity, taekwondo and chess. Having shoved their clueless kids into strangers’ homes, mummies enjoy a bit of that precious commodity – free time. And they’ve earned it by paying to have their kids ‘build their potential’ and ‘increase their confidence’, no? It doesn’t matter that being pressurized to do too much early in life can actually lead to anxiety and diffidence in kids.

Increasingly, psychologists tell us that unstructured time – when children hang about with friends or figure out ways to engage themselves – is important. Between school hours and various classes, what about this generation’s unstructured time? Most of us grew up with time which we were allowed to cheerfully waste. Turns out, that ‘wasted’ time – when we could do what we liked – is actually an important tool to de-stress and to build creativity.

The real risk with parents who ‘work so hard’ is that they start expecting rewards. If Aryaman doesn’t make the building aunties swoon at a ‘society function’, then why did we send him to all those Hindustani Music classes, yaar? And if he does sweep ’em off their feet, then, you know, how about Indian Idol next? Alarmingly, The Guardian’s Terri Apter notes that over-parented kids often grow up to be ‘compliant and devious’, ‘obsessed with grades and lacking interest in their subjects’.

Every generation gets the sort of writing on education which reflects its beliefs and aspirations. In the last century Maria Montessori, Rabindranath Tagore, Waldorf Steiner, Aurobindo, Gijubhai Badheka and others propagated a humanistic, benevolent approach to learning. The 70s had John Holt, who advocated homeschooling. It would be truly sad but telling if Amy Chua – who slaps and stresses-out her kids – were to write our generation’s educational classic!

A longer and duller version of this article appeared in the DNA of Sunday Mar 6. They printed an earlier version by mistake :( and they also used a different title!

Bookstores by the Bay

2011-02-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

Cities–like the people in them–do not live by bread alone. They need mind and soul food to grow into the vibrant entities that they become. Mumbai has been given its mind food–in the form of stories, novels, pamphlets, athletic rule books, comics and other literary whatnots–by a small band of dedicated bookshops which have been around for 50 years and more. Growing organically with the city, these bookshops have seen it all, and with time, become landmarks in themselves.

A corner of the world
The wonderful, timeless Smoker’s Corner is cleverly laid out in the foyer of Botawala Mansion just outside Ballard Estate, the city’s heritage business district. Suleiman Botawala (76) says, “I bought Smoker’s in 1959 from the original British owners who sold tobacco. Since I loved reading, I slowly changed to books. In those days, P M Road was a two-way street, and it was washed clean regularly.”
There is a clean-cut, spare sort of elegance to the shop, with the display arranged neatly in shelves of lovely, rich teak. A piece of string holds the flap of each book shut – to prevent the covers from getting dog-eared, Botawala explains.

Where are his rarest books, I ask. “All in my house!” he replies with a chuckle. “The moment I spot a rare or unique book, I hold on to it till a customer comes and asks for it. Then I usually gift it to them.” Gift it? Whatever happened to the economics of book selling?
“I’ve sold a lot, and besides, sharing books is the greatest joy in life. Here I’ve met some of the most interesting people in the city and I’ve learned so much from each of them. This is my way of giving back something.” One of his customers in the ’80s, a learned, unassuming man, turned out to be Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He was then the Governor of the nearby Reserve Bank of India.
Botawala is never in your face, making it a policy ‘not to interfere’ with customers. However, he also knows his regulars’ tastes, and always has a treat saved for them. Knowing my fondness for obscure Russian children’s books, he gets me a stack of his oldest.
Botawala is genuinely delighted by the new books stores. “They will surely click, because reading is popular once again. Only their prices are forbidding.”
He shows me a thick, aged book of quotations called Noble Thoughts in Noble Languages and smiles, “New shops may have a mind-boggling range of best-sellers, but they don’t have real treasures like these!” [Mr Botawala passed away in 2009. His son Zubair now manages the shop.]

Where the price is always right
Just further down the road from Smoker’s, is Strand Book Stall, another treasure-trove. Here they pride themselves on their consistently low pricing. “We keep the thinnest of margins,” says P M Shenvi (60), the ever-smiling manager. “That’s how we sell many books at less than half their prices, and give 20% off on others. Our aim is to be affordable and we curtail all other expenses towards that. No fancy décor for us!” Despite that, Strand’s book-lined walls have a distinctive ambience. It’s a combination of courtesy, efficiency and the lingering smell of new books.
Strand’s founder, T N Shanbag [who passed away in February 2009], was perhaps the only bookseller to have won a UNESCO award and a Padmashri. “As a young graduate,” Shenvi recounts, “Shanbag was once asked to stop browsing in a bookshop and leave unless he bought something. He dreamt of setting up a bookshop someday that would keep its doors open to browsers – even those without the money to buy.”
Shanbag eventually set up a bookstall with a capital of Rs 450/- in 1948. He rented a small space inside Strand Cinema with the permission of K K Modi, its owner. Shenvi adds, “Later in 1954 we moved here, thanks in part to Justice M C Chagla’s help.” The roster of Strand’s patrons includes names like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sir Ambalal Sarabhai, R K Narayan, Graham Greene, J R D Tata and Nani Palkiwala.
Things have changed with time. “Before, people preferred classics, but now management and self-help books are popular… And back then, our biggest landmarks were Flora Fountain, Handloom House and Khadi Gramudyog,” Shenvi observes.
Does he consider the new chain bookshops competition? “They are good, but you find the same stocks everywhere. I feel that we are really different. Our interest lies more in encouraging reading, in promoting books.”
And as someone who has spent hours browsing at Strand without buying anything at all, I can certainly vouch for that!

Up next, some sporting action
Mumbai is also home to one of the three bookshops in the world that are exclusively devoted to books on sports. Marine Sports, currently located in Dadar, was started on Marine Drive in 1946 by Bruno Braganza. His son Theo Braganza (58) says, “Dad sold sporting goods, but found the cut-throat competition too much.”
So how did the idea for the switch come up? “He used to love reading, and used to go to sports meets. There he found a demand for rule books, and began importing them. By 1956 we had shifted to Dadar and converted to exclusively selling books on sports. Dadar was something of a cricket hub then,” says the genial Braganza.
Though he was trained to be an engineer, Braganza joined Marine Sports in 1972, when his father grew unwell. He also did a course in publishing, combining his interests in books and sports. “Cricketers and other sportsmen have always come to Marine... Gavaskar was a regular. Before any match he would read up on his opponents. Once, before leaving for Australia, he asked me for a book which was sold out. Dad refused to order just one copy. But I insisted because I felt it would make a positive contribution to Gavaskar’s growth. That’s when I realized that what we were really more than just another business.”
And Marine Sports had indeed created mindspace for a whole generation of sports fans, players, young journalists and officials. Braganza says, “Till the ’80s, sports lovers used to buy all kinds of sports books. But after that, with the rising prices, they became selective.” Currently, Braganza reprints and distributes books to institutes and dealers; and buys and sells rare sports books.
What does Braganza miss about the old Mumbai? “Every weekend, Kalbadevi used to have a sprawling book market. We should to revive it, because there is enough interest. If it can happen in Daryaganj in Delhi, then why not here?”
Why not, indeed. Anyone listening?

The grand-daddy of them all
For sheer age and volume of books though, there’s nothing quite like the New and Second Hand Book Store. Shelves and racks in the medium-sized shop are lined with obscure, fascinating old books. Firoze Vishram (65), the owner Sultan Vishram’s brother, takes out a meticulously-written list of their really rare books. A 1711 edition of The Lucubrations by Sir Isaac Bickerstaff is the oldest.
Outside the shop is a wall display of old books for 10/- and 20/-. You’re sure to find a gem or two here. “People sometimes tell us that we sell our books too cheap,” says Vishram. “But we are not interested in huge profits. We buy low and sell low. My grandfather Jamalbhai Rattansey began this business in 1905. He bought books by weight and sold them very cheap. One client, Magistrate Oscar Brown, would sift through the books and correct the pricing, suggesting that some were worth more.”
Currently, the shop is owned by Rattansey’s grandson Sultan Vishram (67). But over the years, the one constant in the shop has been Chandrakant Mankame, its manager of 60 years. Retired now, Vishram recommends that I meet him.
At 75, Mankame is energetic and alert. “I joined the shop as a cleaner in 1944, when my father died. I was 9. One day when the salesman was absent I helped a customer find a book. The owner spotted my interest in books, and encouraged me. Later he put me in charge. I took the responsibility very seriously till I retired in 2005.”
Mankame also developed an eye for rare books. “I felt that books spoke to me when I opened them. I bought up people’s old collections till the walls were completely filled. My guides were people like H S Mardhani (one of the previous owners) and Arun Tikekar.”
Even as we talk, a lady walks in asking for an old book. She has heard that any book in the world can be found here. It’s a formidable reputation to have. Not for nothing, I guess, have Rajneesh, V K Krishna Menon, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Ali Yavar Jang all stopped to browse here.

This was written in Dec 2007 for the Mumbai International Airport’s magazine. Coordinated by Bijal at the Paprika Media Team. The New and Secondhand Bookshop has just shut down. Putting this piece here in memory…

A Tigress for a Mother...

2011-02-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

It’s probably the toughest job in the world, but there’s no training for it. There are no degrees you can get, or papers you could write before they feel you can come on board. Seriously, all it takes to become a parent is the correct set of anatomical parts and a functioning hormonal make-up. And the ‘job’ in concern is a small human being who you have to care for and nurture for the next 20 years. That bit in italics is the scariest thing about parenting.

All you bring to the table, really, are your own emotional baggage and your set of highly idiosyncratic notions on what sort of person your kid should grow up to be. Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother is Amy Chua’s description of how she raised her children, bringing her own unique and mildly demented ideas to the process — often, in the face of her American husband Jed Rubenfeld’s quiet anger and disapproval.

A daughter of Chinese immigrants, a professor of law at Yale, and a renowned writer on ethnicity and foreign affairs, Chua is the epitome of the successful, driven, Asian mom. Brought up in the hard, Chinese way, she is determined not to raise her child like Western parents do — with kindness, quick appreciation and indulgence. Much that she sees wrong in the people around her — neuroses, dysfunctional families, entitled kids with no drive or ambition — she attributes to the Western model of parenting, where parents readily accept their children’s under-achievement and laziness. Western parents let children enjoy their childhood; but Chinese parents, she says, prepare children for the future.

She opts to be a ‘Chinese Mother’, which she explains early on, is not a racial identity but a personality type. ‘Chinese Mothers’ are parents who are ambitious for their children and will steamroll their kids’ immediate desires to ensure their future success. Nothing is fun, she says, till you master it. It’s not enough to be ‘good’ at an instrument; you have to be playing at the Carnegie Hall or performing for international audiences to be acceptable.

Chua’s non-acceptance of mediocrity is across-the-board. She rejects the sloppy birthday cards her kids make her because — with her Confucian wisdom — she knows they can do better. The speeches they write for the funeral of their dead paternal grandmother are moving, simply because Chua wouldn’t accept their first ‘Hallmark-card-type’ efforts. Every success is a direct result of her slave-driving.

In Chua’s view, being a hard-to-please parent will ensure that you raise obedient, devoted, focussed kids who excel at classical music, never become neurotic, and best of all, will look after you in your dotage. Well, her older daughter is just 15 or 16 years old, so let’s not start setting off the fireworks of success yet. Will there be a Guess How My Tiger Mother Scarred Me by one of her kids in the future? Let’s wait and see.

Battle Hymn… is engaging because it makes you cringe and laugh at the same time. Chua’s determination to make a genius out of the family’s dog is funny, while her daughter’s stress-induced biting of the piano’s legs, is not. Working within the cruel-to-be-kind school of parenting, she admits that reprimanding her kids is exhausting, heart-wrenching work. So slapping her daughter in Barcelona — for not kicking her fingers high enough while playing the piano — is the price she pays for giving the child the opportunity to play for an audience ‘in a glass-windowed room, overlooking the Mediterranean’. That she shares these instances in horrifyingly naked detail, is chilling.

Each time Chua goads one of her kids into a stellar public performance, she rests and gloats for a brief moment — usually in the last four lines of the chapter. Then it’s back to nagging them on to another euphoric accolade-drawing effort. Just as this starts getting dull, Battle Hymn… takes a turn for, I’m tempted to say, the human. Her sister’s grave illness becomes a pivot for the story. It is followed by a meltdown of sorts, which brings her the realisation that the Chinese Mother must transmogrify into what she really is — a Western parent. Ironically, the advice that prods her into doing so comes from her mother who raised her the hard, Chinese way.

Battle Hymn… is about choices we make — for ourselves and our children. It is a frightening book in parts, and in others, it nudges us to question our own assumptions. Watching her point out the obvious failures of Western parenting is interesting. But then, just reading about Chua’s horrible excesses — throwing a three-year-old out into the winter evening because she refuses to play one note on the piano — is enough to stamp out all admiration. It makes you want to have her certified.

What works for the book is the close-to-the-bones feeling that Chua brings to her words. She pulls no punches. When her relationship with her second daughter sours, her descriptions of their encounters are as graphic as her writing on her ‘triumphs’. The book is destined to become a bestseller in the chick-lit-for-grown-ups genre. It has that crucial mix of ingredients: clever, glib writing; humour; pretty, successful people with tiny, self-created problems; and a dramatic twist where the angry maverick turns back to the fold of the Western way. All one hopes for is that the book doesn’t become a self-help-type bestseller, with mothers being inspired by its methods.

Now that would be truly scary.

This book review first appeared in the DNA of Feb 6, 2011 with a different title.

No shame or what?

2011-02-10T20:41:00.000-08:00

An old friend from Delhi visited us recently — a really great guy who is stylish in the way that only men from Delhi can be. One evening, I asked him to carry a perfectly good, purple coloured, non-crackly (crucial details) plastic bag. Nothing prepared me for his shocked yelp. “A plastic bag you want me to hold? It crackles and it’s pink! No way! It just won’t go with me.” He shuddered.

I took it back, muttering something like, “Wait-till-you-have-a-kid-bugger.” See, the last six years have changed us. Pista-green candy-striped cloth bags, ugly red-and-yellow umbrellas, Tinkerbell raincoats, sky-blue potty seats and the like have been lugged by us.We have, in many ways, lost our sense of style — and, truly, lost our sense of shame too.

I blame it all on the process of becoming parents. The loss of one’s coolth begins with the woman getting pregnant. As a guy, once your woman’s bump starts to show, and there’s that civilised and public acknowledgement of your sex life by neighbours and parents, you change in crucial ways. Don’t ask me how or why, but it happens. I had fertility issues at one point, and I remember the doctor — a respectable, middle-aged, mom-type — asking us to ‘have relations as many times as possible’ on a particular date. I stared at her for five whole seconds, eyes narrowed, wondering what she was saying. And suddenly I realised that she was asking us to have sex. When we recovered from the acute nails-on-the-wall-feeling induced by her euphemism, we knew that nothing would be the same any more; least of all, the act itself.

As for women — do I really need to elaborate? Somehow, having a child is equivalent to being in a reality show inside a goldfish bowl. Because once you’re pregnant, the human race at large suddenly begins to take an active interest in you. This is probably an atavistic thing, dating back to centuries of being concerned about she-who-bears-life. Apart from being prodded by the doctor and his/her team, the world and its cousin will advise you. The best nugget I got was a vital tip on human anatomy from an elderly Punjabi uncle on my morning walks. He recommended that I eat the ghee-rich ‘panjeeri,’ which would ‘make the insides smooth’ so that the baby ‘comes out easily’. Between incomprehension and shock, there is a small space called parenthood.

Inevitably and slowly, you will relax into the state, wantonly discussing vomiting, acidity and bowel movements with strangers.

I remember that my salwar’s naada used to keep slipping down the parabola of my belly, and I would keep hitching it up. Pull up that naada in full public view often enough and you realise that dignity-wise, it’s all south from here. (Why did I continue wearing falling-naada salwars? Because this was deep, dark 2003, when only aerobics instructors and male dancers wore tights.

Respectable pregnant women were either looking like ducks in frocks, or seahorses in saris, or were wearing ‘punjabi dresses’.)
Once you have the baby, the change is irreversible. You talk about food, poop, milk and breast pumps with a quiet insouciance. You used to be angsty, reserved, cool people. Now you’re loud, hustling parents, who have no qualms asking stern pediatricians daft questions, or doling out free advice to pregnant women and new moms. Yeah, and you stop being so darn particular about things like bags.

Between losing her senses of style, shame and sanity, Anita Vachharajani raises a child and writes children’s books

This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Jan 30, 2011

So, you work from home?

2011-01-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

No, frankly, I just pretend to. Really, all I do is answer the doorbell. Answer the doorbell to the cook, who, being trained in the offense-is-the-best-defense school of culinary arts, blasts me immediately for the lack of key ingredients.

Then I answer the doorbell to various couriers — for me, for husband, for neighbour and neighbour’s relative. Answer the doorbell to someone who wants to sell me multiplex coupons. Followed by someone, allegedly from the electric board, who wants to sell me an appliance which will halve my power bills. When the Art of Living guys ring, promising to bring calm into my life, I start foaming at the mouth.

Finally, I plop down on my ‘office’ — the divan in the hall, a parking zone for crayons, earrings, kid’s underpants, notebooks and novels, left-over food and teacups. When you work from home, ‘official’ space and time are ill-defined. Inexplicably, you end up working longer hours and getting paid less.

For instance, while reviewing a long, serious book recently, I carefully wrote on notelets and stuck them in. I normally find sticky notes too wasteful, but this lot were an irresistible leaf-green and plum in colour (in a freelancer’s lonely life, things like nice stationery matter). So I really couldn’t blame my daughter when she opened the book which was lying around and spent a blissful 15 minutes taking out each note, admiring it, and using it to form a long green-and-plum snake. I mean, she’s six. She doesn’t recognise boundaries which are not physical. Colours are irresistible to her. Deep sigh. That’s four hours of my life I’m never getting back, and one needlessly late night to make good.

While working from home, your time is pretty much cut up and tossed all over the place like dhania in the bhel puri. It’s not fair on the kid either, because to a small child it’s inexplicable that mom/dad can be home, but not be available. Nothing says ‘I’m here, but just not for you’ better than looking into a laptop and typing busily while your child is saying something.

I should know — I’ve done it often enough. After six years of accepting my distracted parenting, my daughter finally said the other day, “You don’t spend time with me.” I started to protest and tell her about the hours I have spent shoveling food into her mouth. With the wisdom of her kind, she cut in, “And feeding me lunch is not spending time with me, ok?” For the record, if I didn’t have a chronic health problem, I’d be out there running for the VT fast every single day.

Because kids are small animals, they know it when you’re with them 100% and when you’re somewhere else in your head. When office-going parents come home tired, children, worshipful and huggy, are like balm to their weary souls. To us work-from-home types, kids are just another kind of doorbell. Cute, but still very much in the way.

Eight years back I read that Enid Blyton’s younger daughter had had an unhappy childhood because, apparently, Ma Blyton was more than a little neglectful of her own offspring. She was entirely focussed on creating magic for other people’s kids and on what we would today call ‘building her brand’. Then, my lips had curled in disgust at her cruelty. Now — except for the talent, the success and the wealth — I’ve begun to remind me just a little bit of her.

Between cooks, doorbells and courier deliveries, Anita Vachharajani tries to write children's books

This article appeared in the DNA of Oct 24, 2010

In which, a lot was seen!

2011-01-13T04:09:00.000-08:00

Just back from a holiday in Tamil Nadu. For a spell that was so hopelessly mis-planned and unplanned, I must say it ended up being great fun. Since Amit – calm, efficient, centred – is the producer and general go-to-guy for so many international crews shooting documentaries all over India, it’s logical that the one who plans and executes the family holidays should be me. The paranoid and anxious half.

This trip to TN, started, for some reason, by falling between the stools. I had thought we were on the right track - two days each in Mahabalipuram, Pondicherry, Auroville. Spaced out so my back wouldn’t give way. But then I got dire warnings – of major BOREDOM, among other things! Fearfully we went, and, as it turned out - thanks to serendipity and human kindness - we had a blast in every way, especially the visual.

Not only did we enjoy Pondi and Auroville, we met some lovely people in these places too. The highlights of the trip were the monoliths of Mahabs (for me the Mahishasuramardini cave which I walked in alone and the bizarrely wonderful sculpture college); Auroville and the Gump-a-lump Xmas party; and finally, the heritage walk with Ashok Panda of Intach, Pondicherry (later, getting gloriously lost in the Tamil Quarter, finding Choco-la, eating their rum choc and getting high under a hot TN sun), and later still, with exceptional luck, being allowed into Ananda Rangapillai’s house by his kind family.

A lot of what we saw and delighted in on this trip – the rock-cut caves in Mahabs, the street sellers sculpting little stone lockets and statues, the whole of the man-made forest in Auroville, the crocheted shoes they make, the cookies they bake, the houses and streets in Pondi, the plaster cast angels and Santas sold outside Samba Kovil, the beautiful beadwork done on Ravi Varma’s lithos by Ananda Ranga's great-grand-daughter-in-law – was about craft in one form or the other.
But the artist we engaged with the most was Saraswati, a ceramic miniaturist, who lives and works in Dana, the pottery community in Auroville. I’ve long liked Auroville’s tradition of contemporary pottery – as seen thru their mugs and cups and plates. Very beautiful, in a remote, still, cool, forest-glade sort of way.

So nothing prepared us for the liveliness of Saraswati’s creations. For its sheer lightness of being. Apart from coffee and some lovely dark chocolate, we were invited to wade through her studio housed in a two-storey house in the middle of the seriously wooded Dana. The studio was colourful, and everything there was small, even the impossibly flat tree frog that leapt across their painted walls. Amit went mad with the photos.
Saraswati’s work is busy, tiny, textured, and totally inventive. Like something out in a story-book-world full of whimsy. Since her pieces are mostly profusely populated miniatures, Saraswati prefers to work with white body clay, which is flexible and thin enough to make what she calls “small and smaller details”.
We can’t help but comment on her unusual colours and how they make the figures look delicate and other-worldly. Turns out that she uses commercial glazes from Russia. “I have got used to them since 20 years, and it’s difficult to break the habit of having really bright and translucent colours,” she qualifies.
Saraswati first heard about Auroville at 15 years. “Since then my mother had dreamt of coming here. It became possible only in 1998, when our country became more open and overcame the main post-Soviet economical crisis. But the final decision of staying here, I took in 2004.” Apart from working in her own studio called Have Fun Pottery, she also teaches at the White Peacock Center for Clay Education with her mother, a teacher and a ceramist.
The house she lives in is greener, wilder than most parts of Auroville that we have walked through (which is, admittedly, not much at all). The tree frogs, the grasses, the flying insects – you feel that it all sort of comes together and resonates through her work, in the many little creatures that she makes to populate her art. “If I were to put it in a hierarchy of values,” she replies, “I would put living in Auroville as a city of dreamers as the most inspiring thing for me. I feel I belong here. Next I would say the green, peaceful surroundings inspire me, and after that, living in Dana. For me it is very important to measure my breath with the rhythm of the big dream of this unique place. I would think that it was a coincidence – a beautiful joke of life – that the Divine put me to live in Dana, where most of the pottery-community live and work.”

There’s a story within each piece that Saraswati crafts, so that you can gaze at it for the longest time. In her kitchen stove series, all of the household’s gustatory needs are found on the stove (including a delicious-loooking fried egg which threatens to ooze off its pan). I loved the earrings and pendants, and her Christmas fridge magnets – a row of snowmen who look like they are in the middle of a good gossip session. Amit’s favourites were, I think, this rather stern, story-book-character looking lady, and this jug which has a world around it.

About her process of creating the pieces, Saraswati says, “Each piece goes through my hands, and this hand-crafting is the longest part of the process. Then it goes through the bisque fire in an electrical furnace for four hours. Then it’s glazed (by brush, all the tiny details are worked on and coloured here), and then it’s finally fired for another six hours. If I am not happy with the result, I may keep adding glazes and firing again till I am satisfied.”

You can see more of Saraswati’s work on her site.

Lost and Found

2010-12-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

Lost And Found is a well-intentioned book. It has its heart in the right place. It’s only the mind which has gone for a long, meandering walk. The result is a plot so full of strains, threads and characters, that you stand a risk of losing yourself — and not in a good way either.

Lakshmi is the content writer for a porn website about ‘the sensory adventures of a beautiful, blind girl’ called, not very originally, ‘Kavita’. Years back, after a sexual encounter on a train one night, Lakshmi had become pregnant. Of the twins she delivered, one was abandoned in a temple and the other was given to a stranger in a taxi. One twin, Nirmal, is now a street child/actor, and the other, Salim, is a Pakistani jehadi. He is in Mumbai as a part of the 26/11 terror squad.

Placid Hari Odannur, a freelance journalist, is the one who, Lakshmi insists, forced himself on her 16 years ago. So, in the present, a night before the terror attack, she has kidnapped him and tied him up in her bathroom. The attack is set against this melee, a Cow Sena march, the terrorist-minder’s midlife crisis, newspaper-office politics and a rickshaw driver’s day.

In the hands of a less self-conscious writer, one with more rigour and economy of expression, the story might have crackled surreally. Surendran’s sub-plots, multiple threads, and tendency to tell you too much about every minor character, get tiresome. Sometimes you feel he is trying hard — but failing — to evoke a Llosa, a Marquez, and even, in desperation, a Manmohan Desai. His prose sparkles occasionally, when he manages to restrain himself from saying too much.

The book does have a few truly attractive elements. The fact that Surendran locates the story in the 26/11 attacks, and decides to delve a bit deeper there, to humanise those that the media has demonised entirely, is interesting. You get a definite sense of his engagement with Mumbai, its history, its realities and the way forces of fundamentalism play out here. To be fair, the novel does tighten up around halfway through.

The teeming landscape of Lost And Found is peppered with the implausible — a double-edged sword which perhaps only authors with the right mix of control and madness must play with. Because we have grown up on Manmohan Desai, we will buy the long-lost-brothers thing, and even the madness of the fictive world where the entire ‘family’ comes together in the course of one turbulent night. But even within this fictional universe, it’s hard to believe that Lakshmi, 19, educated and middle-class, would have had to run away to Goa and spend her pregnancy selling trinkets on a beach. Finally, it is the ham-handed treatment, the lack of really nuanced dialogues and situations that fails Lost And Found.

The newspaper’s dynamics are entertaining, but Surendran spends too much time exploring the local colour of the journalist’s world to really plunge deep. Lakshmi and her friend Beverly show little or no character development. Hari, too, though 35, seems implausibly adolescent. The street boy and the rickshaw driver often become clichés. Culpably, the characters often use words that are more the author’s than their own.

Surendran probably set off to create a mad, chaotic, maelstrom of a book. What he has done, though, is write one that has so many layers piled on to it that it sags under the weight of its own cleverness. And somehow, you can’t help but resent the writer for botching up what must have been a remarkable idea to begin with.

(This review appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Dec 26)

Small Blunders - Articles from the DNA Column

2010-12-08T20:11:00.000-08:00

It’s hard work being a parent. But you’ve probably heard that one before. What is more intriguing is why people have kids in the first place. All through those nine months of nausea, I kept feeling that motherhood was evolution’s biggest joke on women. I figured the first time round you could get conned into it, but why would you do it a second or a third time?

There is of course a good measure of self-love involved in having a baby. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Look ma, I made a little human and it looks, talks and behaves like me. Also, as humans we love to be needed, and after six to eight months of being needed so viscerally by a small human being, you sort of begin to get off on the feeling. No one else looks at you with such adoration, no one else smiles with such delight when he sees your face (he’s probably thinking of lunch, but we'll let that pass). No one else, frankly, needs you with such abandon and such fury. Parenting can give you a heady sense of power. The nicest parents, I guess, are those who don’t misuse that power.

Though it isn’t apparent at first, this need to be needed contributes to some extent to most parents taking the plunge again. Five years after cribbing about pregnancy, when my child was beginning to become her own person, I was willing to go through all of it again just to have another needy little butterball in my arms. At some level, I’m guessing we're hard-wired to procreate, to make copies of ourselves and fill the planet. We could slow down now, because the planet has more than enough of us. But I guess our psyches haven’t heard the news yet.

Having a child is not just one long ego-massage, though (praise from passing strangers dries up after your kid hits seven). An emotional knuckle-duster waits just around the corner. Forget all the physical effort: the night feeds, the colic, the teething, the falls, the terrible twos, the preschool-admission rush, the homework, the tiffins you’ve packed andthe various illnesses and accidents that will have your kachhas in a twist forever.

That’s the easy part compared to the painful realisation that no matter what you do, no matter which toys you get and what theme parties you throw, one day the apple of your eye will turn into a Cynical Young Person. She will probably gobsmack you when she looks back at all your years as a devoted helicopter parent and smirks: ‘Well, I didn’t ask to be born, did I?’ To kids of a certain age, the only perfect parent is their best friend’s dad or mom. You just about manage not to disgrace yourself by starving her to death or something.

Six years back, between spraying out jets of vomit, I paused to ask my mother why women went through so much physical stress just to have children. Convinced that I was insane, and being the queen of understatement that she is, she shrugged and said, ‘Because when you have a child, time passes.’ It’s been over six years now that I’ve been a parent myself, and with every passing day, I realise that raising a child does play tricks with time.

Moments get stretched into lifetimes, so that you never forget that first smile, that first word, that first step. But days turn into liquid whirlwinds and simply swish by, till, before you know it, the adorable little cuddlebunny is a snarling teen. One more swish and he becomes a parent himself, aware of how much trouble raising a child can be, and finally, finally ready to be grateful for all you did.

Maybe mom was right. Maybe it’s worth it after all!

This article appeared in the DNA on Sunday, Sept 26, 2010
Link here: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/comment_mama-knows-best_1443353

Tales of a City

2010-10-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

Most people who live in Mumbai feel a peculiar sort of love for it. Many things are wrong with this dystopian, poorly-planned city, but most of us probably couldn’t bear to live elsewhere. If, like me, you feel this mix of emotions, then you’re going to love Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables.

The book pulls together Mumbai’s many narratives – cinematic, literary, architectural and artistic. It is a tale of the legends, poems, books, novels, mysteries, newspaper articles, film songs, advertisements, architectural styles, comic books, apocryphal stories and paintings inspired by this city. Through them, Prakash is able to distill an imagining of Mumbai that is more real than a straightforward history, simply because it is told by so many different voices.

Mumbai’s story, as it unfolds in Prakash’s narrative, is an absorbing one, with varied sources: newspapers and pamphlets, books, paintings, interviews and songs, lawsuits and art. To each set of texts, Prakash brings his unique eye. With the entertaining Marathi writer Govind Narayan Madgavkar (Mumbaiche Varnan) or the Parsi writer Sir Dinshaw Wacha (Shells from the Sands of Bombay) or the British police commissioner S M Edwardes (ethnographic sketches for The Times of India), Prakash is interested in the visual ‘reading of the city’. To Madgavkar and Wacha, the ‘kaleidoscopic but orderly’ cosmopolitanism of Bombay is riveting. Edwardes is captivated by the colourful, exotic ‘Indian’ life that unfolds just outside of the British quarter. Like his contemporaries, he too is caught up in the ‘image of otherness’ that the city’s sights offer.

There are nuggets aplenty – you’ll never look at art deco or the Marine Drive in the same way again, and suddenly, street names develop a back-story. Some of our wealthiest philanthropists, for instance, were opium traders (like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the Wadias, the Cowasjis and Motichund Aminchund). There were committed professionals as well, like Dr A G Viegas, who diagnosed Bombay’s first case of bubonic plague. Confidence tricks and murder were a Bombay thing back then as well, as seen in Naoroji Dumasia’s crime books – one of which was based on the cases of Sardar Mir Abdul Ali, a real police detective.

The startling thing about Mumbai Fables is its sheer scope. Here you will find the story of the film studios and the secular seeds of the film industry; the rise and fall of the mill politics; the thrilling story of the Nanavati murder case and how the Blitz reported it; and unsettling accounts of the Babri-Masjid riots and the bomb blasts. Hindi film songs and Marathi Dalit poetry feature here, as do Meera Devidayal’s Mumbai-taxi-inspired paintings, the wonderful Hindi comic/graphic novel Doga, cartoons from Marathi newspapers, and the pulsating life and commerce of Dharavi. Like the creators of these texts, Prakash is an outsider and an admirer, but his prose is coloured with a sense of the beauty of this city – of its unique, alluring cosmopolitanism. Reading …Fables, you can understand what it was that drew everyone from the Konkani mill-worker to the Urdu poet here.

Prakash writes of the processes that shaped the city’s geography to accommodate human greed and industrial pressures, often at the cost of common sense. He discusses the various attempts made to ‘plan’ Mumbai, to reclaim land and ‘colonise nature’. Almost all of those attempts were either inspired or marred by greedy collusions between governments and corporates. This greed has overpowered vision, and ‘people’s needs’ have been used as an excuse to grab land or to build haphazardly.

Interestingly, the first people to think of reclaiming land from the sea were the Portuguese, but the process began only when the East India Company took over. Started in 1784, reclamations had, by 1872, added four million square yards to Bombay. Girangaon or the ‘Village of Mills’ sprouted up to meet the international demand for cotton. Unhygienic conditions and a particularly heavy monsoon led to the bubonic plague epidemic of 1896-97. The disregard for public good was of course a sign of colonial times, but seen in today’s context, it seems eerily familiar.

Prakash chronicles all of this with a novel-like quality. He describes the various blunders around the Backbay reclamation project and a campaign against it by the nationalist lawyer Khurshed Framji Nariman (supported by the Bombay Chronicle, which was edited by an anti-colonial Irishman, B G Horniman). Nariman took up cause against the mosquito-breeding ‘grand mess’ that the project had become, was sued by the British government, and went on to completely trounce them. The project was reinstated years later, and, in a terribly ironic gesture, a part of the area was named after him. Prakash details how thoughtful planners like Charles Correa and honest bureaucrats like J B D’Souza have met with similar obstacles later.

Which is not to say that Mumbai Fables does not have its flaws. While the chapter on films is probably the best in the book, the one on Russi Karanjia and the Nanavati case is a bit weak. Also Prakash tends to slip into parenthetical discussions, which make for a turgid read. The book takes time to climb into your head and explode there – the beginning, for instance, is dull, but stick with it, because explode it does!

This is an important book, especially today, when we are in the danger of not just repeating history, but bludgeoning ourselves on the head with it. The city’s loss of open, green spaces, as well as the Mumbai University chancellor’s dismissal of a book based on the demands of a politician’s young son, are indicative of the fact that we need to read this book, to revisit history and learn from it, so that we don’t look like complete fools a hundred years from now.

Mumbai Fables
Gyan Prakash
HarperCollins Publishers India
Rs 599
396 pp

(This was originally written for the Sunday DNA and can be viewed here: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/review_book-review-mumbai-fables_1453744)

kerala kathas

2010-08-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

in kerala, chasing the red rain and silent scientists, the male vachharajani tiredly reached trivandrum, where the kind hari, sound recordist, took him to a remaindered books stall, where he found these gems.

pipiou, a french book and disc (a small LP) with really sweet illustrations. it was an advt for green peas, using this fella and a slogan that went: "on a toujours besoin de petits pois chez soi" or in this girl detective's high-school french - one always needs a little peas at home. and please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.

A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce, which, according to wikipedia 'follows the story of a boy (13 years old) who visits an unusual family and their home. While spending the day in the Robinson household, Wilbur's best friend joins in the search for Grandfather Robinson's missing false teeth and meets one wacky relative after another'. disney made a film based on it called meet the robinsons

and then the jewel of the lot, richard erdoes's (1912-2008) peddlers and vendors of the world. which is a part of the three-book series that this anthropologist-cum-illustrator (i guess in the pre-internet world, people had the time to explore all of their interests!) had done. the other two are: musicians of the world and (of all things) policemen of the world. it's all very crisp and mid-century modernist + western in style and execution. quite incorrect, but so so so delightful. here are some pics from the books. (for some reason blogger's mangling my captions - so i removed them.)

A Review of Serious Men by Manu Joseph

2010-07-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

Ayyan Mani, a Tamil Dalit, lives in Mumbai’s BDD chawl. His life is quite meshed with that of his neighbours, and yet, stands a bit apart, in that he dares to think beyond his grim circumstances. Working in the Institute of Theory and Research as PA to its Director, the formidable Arvind Acharya, Ayyan uses his power to make people wait, read confidential letters, listen to private phone calls, and delightfully, to subvert the thought-for-the-day once a week.

A conflict is brewing between Acharya and Jana Nambodri, the Deputy Director. To Ayyan, it is the War of the Brahmins, an event he longs to witness. An astrobiologist, Oparna Goshmaulik, enters the situation somewhere in the middle of all this. The playing out of academic politics takes an ugly hue, weaving its way around sexual politics and Ayyan’s private drama of creating a myth around his child.

Joseph’s plot is a tale that breathes around us. It is a story that needs the parallel realities of Mumbai to flower. His treatment of it, however, sometimes becomes clichéd and tedious, as in the drawing out of his main characters. The less important people – Jana, Ayyan’s wife Oja, his son Adi and Acharya’s wife Lavanya – are drawn with a delicate precision. The descriptions make you sit up, recognizing this human charade here and that foible there. While Ayyan, Acharya and Oparna populate long passages, somehow, their actions seem poorly etched and unconvincing. Acharya, the academic who falls for Oparna, definitely needed more skilful rendering.

Oparna’s character is almost cruelly drawn. She goes from a restrained yet stunning scientist, to a lovelorn seductress and finally, a vengeful saboteur who spills the beans on herself conveniently. Just in time to aid the plot, she disappears. Though Acharya sleeps with her for a fortnight and then tamely goes back to the silence of his marriage, he emerges as the idealist, whose job and personal life fall back in place nicely.

Joseph’s is a male novel, interested in the interior landscapes of men – whether poor or rich, Brahmin or Dalit, scientist or peon. How everyone reacts to Oparna in the Institute that has next to no women, leave alone attractive ones, is keenly observed. This focus on a male internal landscape is not problematic in itself. Many novels have engaged with the landscape of women’s worlds and still worked. Here, however, the plot suffers for it. You could perhaps accept Lavanya’s prompt forgiving of her husband; what you don’t feel convinced by is Oparna’s startling volte face.

The language ranges from tart, funny observations and brilliant single-stroke descriptions (the silver-haired Jana ‘had this affliction to be with the youth’) to awkward, embarrassing turns-of-phrase (like ‘the unmistakable insanity of formidable women who long to crumble’ or when looking at the young mothers outside his son’s school and their clothes, Ayyan observes that ‘their asymmetric panty-lines were like birds in the sky drawn by a careless cartoonist’). That is when you are not skipping pages of pointless prose. Annoyingly, the authorial voice keeps popping in disruptively. Ayyan, an intellectual and a political being, refuses to convert to Christianity and rejects Hinduism. His disdain is discussed economically, often humorously. He has opinions on everything, and sometimes, you suspect they are Joseph’s.

Read Serious Men because it explores the many small politics around us – between the smart man in a chawl and the more laidback; between the parents of the poor-but-brilliant boy in school and the more prosperous ones; between husband, wife and the rather unfortunate child. There are stories here which need to be told – that Joseph drags them all into his first book is perhaps a mark of a writerly courage which stands on the edge of bravado.

A shorter version of this review appeared in the DNA of Sunday, July 11, 2010

Interview with Philip Pullman!!

2010-05-08T23:38:00.000-07:00

For many days in April, I walked on a cloud of purplish-pink satin. The DNA had asked me to interview Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials Trilogy, and positively one of my favourite-est writers. As I told Amit, for just a few moments in time and space, he would be reading my words. Amit had wanted to call our first-born Lyra, since we had n when we were fresh from reading all three books. I would have too, except somehow, Lyra Vachharajani didn't quite do it for me.
The DNA had to chop the questions and answers for space, so here, peoples, is the whole truth!

In 1995, a year before Harry Potter flew in on his broom, a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman made a quiet yet significant entry. Northern Lights, the first part of the His Dark Materials Trilogy, tells the story of two children who meet across parallel universes and end up subverting the Church’s authority in a breathlessly exciting journey across seas, skies and worlds. Darker and less gimmicky than J K Rowling’s Potter story, the Trilogy sold 15 million copies, earned critical acclaim, won the coveted Whitbread Book Award and, inevitably, attracted moral censure.

With a wide range of influences like John Milton, William Blake, Heinrich von Kleist, the King James Bible and comic books, Pullman has written around 20 very successful books including plays, fairytales, and novels for the young. In a Pullman book – whatever its scope or size – the story is always king. Over email he tells Anita Vachharajani about his latest book, the allure of stories, and his advice to book-burning fundamentalists everywhere.

The books in the Dark Materials trilogy were filled with a longing for individual freedom within a humane, good and principled universe. There is also a robust rejection of authority. I feel that The Good Man Jesus… takes this theme further. Jesus is the more truly human, the more worshipful brother; while Christ has a larger vision for an organized religion. Could you comment on this?
In one way, the two brothers represent two of the types of authority described by the sociologist Max Weber. Jesus is the embodiment of charismatic leadership, which is based on the domination of the leader by means of miracles, magical powers, prophecy, and so on. Christ is the embodiment of a later sort of leadership: not possessing any sort of charismatic gifts himself, he envisages a church based on the authority of tradition. The progression from one to the other is typical of the way many organisations develop.

For someone who is reportedly an atheist, you take religion very seriously especially when you are being critical of it. Allusions to the Bible, prayers and hymns permeate your work and your discussions. Was religion a very significant part of your childhood?
Yes, very much so. Not in an oppressive way - simply that I grew up in the household of my grandfather, who was a clergyman in the Church of England. I went to church every Sunday, I absorbed the stories, I loved the language of the liturgy and the King James Bible. It's a large part of what made me.

You were a teacher during the ’70s. Did interacting directly with children influence your storytelling and your craft as a writer?
I was a teacher before we had such a thing as the National Curriculum in England. We had a great deal more freedom in those days, and I thought it would be a good idea to tell the children (I was teaching 11-13 year olds) some of the stories of the Greek myths - simply because they were wonderful stories, and I couldn’t see that they would ever hear them otherwise. So I did that, and I also wrote a play to be performed at the end of every Christmas term. The experience of these things played a big part in my apprenticeship, so to speak. As far as the plays were concerned, I had to entertain a mixed audience - both the children and their parents. The one thing I didn't want to do was have a bit of silly slapstick for the children, and then a bit of clever word-play for the adults, for example. Absolutely not! So I had to make up a story that would make them all laugh for the same reasons, or make them all feel the same suspense, or move them all in the same way. To take them all seriously as members of an audience.

You once said in an interview with Robert Butler that ‘your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family’. Your characters are often adolescents caught in that awkward space between childhood and a more adult awareness of the world. As a writer, why does this point in a character’s life interest you so much?
I remember my own adolescence, both for its hideous embarrassments and for the sense of thrilling intellectual adventure. It is a very important time of transition for everyone - transition from one form of thinking to another, as much as anything else. We develop a sense of where we are intellectually, which is not always the same as where we find ourselves dwelling. In my case, I discovered a passionate devotion to the arts in myself, whereas my family that cared for them not at all. Perhaps one day I shall write my memoirs...

Your books have universal appeal – adults and kids enjoy them. What do you think draws so many adult readers to your books?

One thing, definitely, is the experience I describe in 3 above. Because I take the story seriously myself, it tends to be the sort of story that adults can take seriously. And it touches young people at the point in their lives when they are going through the experiences that will make them into adults, and they can see that I'm talking to them without patronising them. At least I hope so!

Who would you say are the greatest influences on your work as a writer and a storyteller?
I would say that the greatest influences must have been all the great stories that I've read, and the enjoyment I've derived from them. When you become interested in stories and how they work, your enjoyment is doubled. There is never an end to the delight one can derive from stories.

How do you react to fundamentalists and people who fear that reading your books would corrupt their children?
If I were to offer such people a word of sincere advice, it would be this: don't make such a fuss. By making a fuss about this or that book, you only increase your children's desire to read it secretly. Haven't you realized that? My advice would be - ignore it completely. Regard it as beneath your notice. Don't say a word about it. The more you call for such books to be banned, the more excitement about them you stir up. Haven't you learned that
yet?

Some of your writing can be viewed as being anti-Church. Yet your novels have an avowedly moral universe a world where humanistic values triumph. How has the British religious establishment reacted to this?
For the most part, with a mature and unworried indifference.

You said on your website that ‘I thought it would be hard to find an audience for this story [the His Dark Materials trilogy]’. Could you tell us a bit about why you thought the series wouldn’t find an audience and what happened when the books actually went out into the world?
I hoped it might reach the sort of audience my previous books had found, which is to say the small audience of children and adults (teachers and librarians) who are interested in reading books labelled ‘children’s books’. And that was exactly what happened, at first. But little by little children must have been urging their parents to read it, because I noticed that audiences at the events I did were getting older and larger. By the time 'The Amber Spyglass' came out, there were as many adults reading me as children. And of course I was very gratified by that; it was a reward for the apprenticeship in telling stories that I'd gone through as a teacher.

You’ve probably been asked this question many times before, but I have to know: the idea of a daemon in the His Dark Materials trilogy a living animal which represents a person’s character and always accompanies him or her is striking and unique. Where did it come from? How did you decide that a child’s ever-changing daemon would freeze when she moved into adulthood? Finally, if you had a daemon, what would it be?

The idea of the daemon didn't come to me until I'd tried to write the first chapter many times, and each time been foiled. It just wasn't working. When I discovered that Lyra had a daemon, the story became much easier to tell.
Soon it was obvious that the whole story would turn on the nature of the daemon, on the moment when it settled, on the very difference between adults and children; and I couldn't imagine how I had ever thought I could write the story without daemons.

Oh, and my daemon is a raven - or a jackdaw, or a magpie: one of those birds that steal bright glittering things.

The Trilogy has many unforgettable characterizations Lyra Belacqua, Serafina Pekkala the witch, Iorek Byrnison the bear, to name just a few. There are parallel universes our own and many others, one seemingly Victorian world (where Zeppelins fly) and creations like the Subtle Knife and the alethiometer. How did you cope with the challenges of this vast canvas? Was it tough living with so many vibrant characters in your head?

Actually, it was a lot easier than writing a short story. That's the real challenge. Remembering the various characters wasn't hard in the least: they were all so vivid to me that I couldn't have forgotten them even if I'd wanted to. And working on a vast canvas makes it easy to solve a narrative problem by inventing a whole new world ... As I say, writing a short story is much harder than that.

From the rich joyfulness and texture of fantasy to The Good Man Jesus… which has the tight economy of a fable. How challenging was it to make the transition from a complex and layered style to one that is far more spare?
It was very interesting. I thought I'd try to do without landscape, and weather, and imagery. The only imagery in Jesus is when one of the characters uses a simile or a metaphor. The narrator eschews such devices. Similarly, there is hardly any description, whether of landscape or of characters. As for weather, the only weather in the gospels is a storm; but I thought I could do without that too. I was trying to get down to the bare bones of story, where there are events and nothing else. Neutral, uninflected storytelling.

Your re-telling of fairy tales like Puss in Boots and Aladdin offer a layered version of old favourites. What draws you to re-visit these classic stories?
Simply the fact that they are wonderful shapes to handle. As a jazz musician enjoys the sequence of chords in this or that tune, so I enjoy the sequence of events in a classic fairy tale and I love playing variations over it.

In Count Karlstein there is a lovely interplay between text and words the book jumps in and out of comic-book-style drawings. How important do you think the visual element is in a book for young children?
Picture-books are profoundly important in helping children not only to read but to acquire a visual language as well. I think we should spend much more time than we do in teaching children to draw. Nothing helps you see something so well as drawing it; nothing gives you so acute a visual sense.
In this world where so much information is delivered to us in graphic images, it is vitally important to have a way of talking about and analyzing these forms of communication.

Your drawings appear at the start of each chapter in the Dark Materials trilogy. They are melancholic, spare and arresting. How did you end up drawing for the books? Do you plan to draw a children¹s book and write it as well as in the future?
The publisher wanted a symbol of some kind at the start of each chapter, and I thought I could do better than that and draw a picture. He was very sceptical until I produced three or four drawings to show that I could do it. As for a picture book, I can do certain things but not others. To tell a story in pictures you need faces, and faces are very hard to do.

So for the moment I shall hold back from trying a picture book!

A shorter version of this interview appeared in the DNA of Sunday, April 9, 2010. You can read it here: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/interview_my-sincere-advice-to-religious-fanatics-ignore-the-book_1380767

Think of it as work

2010-04-06T23:13:00.000-07:00

A terrible, terrible writer's block has happened. It’s not your normal walnut-sized block, which you can prod and push with your finger and work around. Usually, at least my instinct to write puerile rubbish is readily available, and no walnut-sized critters can stop that. Nonsense, no-sense, and embarrassing pap – it’s there. On tap. Pours out at will, and then I can whittle and friends and Amit can edit and ‘suggest changes’ till a work of at least some honesty comes out. This time, there's no go. This particular block is – at my estimation – about 18 feet high and 12 feet wide. It’s slate-grey and hard and made up of tough materials like laziness and a good measure of greyhazystuff - a material which fills my mind with moss-like nothingness. It has not been spotted in a long time, but our records show that it has been known to exist.

Logically, this would be the time to take a tiny break. But because deadlines exist in a writer’s world just as they do elsewhere in civilized society, one feels guilty. And that’s when one begins to think of all forms of frittery as Work – as in, this Work will inspire me to get back to real work type of 'work'. Want to read a P D James? Well, I am a writer. So reading = work? Want to chat with a friend instead of struggling against the dark block? Hell-llo, I am a stressed out, work-from-home mom, surely talking to a friend, saving myself a therapist's fee and clearing my head for Writerly Thoughts is helpful? Want to spend my day looking at Doonesbury, Berke Breathed, Wondermark and the Oatmeal? Now isn't that a gesture of solidarity with these masters of sarcasm and irony, and isn’t reading good writing a useful thing in itself? Want to spend a day gazing at people's narcissistic outpourings on fb? Come now, the ability to laugh at human folly is No. 1 important quality in writers. Yes? Want to cheat on diet a bit and eat rubbish? Two threptin biscuits with a giant mug of tea instead of a fruit – surely, eating badly is a writer’s right? Hey, the world is full of idea-triggers. Who knows where my next one will come from?

As a writer, you’re supposed to dip your pen in the inkwell of life (finally, a metaphor – even a cheap one – remember what I said about rubbish on tap?). So practically anything can be Thought of as Work. Even – and especially – wasting time on the net, thinking up clever fb posts, reading recipes, chatting online and writing a blog post after so long (which, compared to fb status msgs, seems like real literature). Into this category fall expensive holidays (communing with nature and the swimming pool?) or shopping (people watching?) and sitting on the sofa eating chips, watching Seinfeld.

A writer's work should – ideally – be all about answering email interviews, helping design the book's cover, selecting and rejecting artworks with a sweet, condescending smile, signing royalty receipts and 10-page contracts, attending book readings, being gazed at worshipfully and posing for pictures which are a mix of youthful innocence + the self-assurance of age. What is this nonsense about writing for three-hours-a-day, I say. That is so frickin' uncool - definitely not what I paid my entrance fee to the mediocre-and-underpaid-writers-club for.

We'll miss you, Vinda!

2010-03-15T02:30:00.000-07:00

Vinda Karandikar, one of the liveliest and most radical of Marathi poets, passed away yesterday. At 92, he had no doubt led a full life... I encountered his Pishi Mavshi or Aunty Witch poems and other nonsense when I was translating for The Tenth Rasa: The Penguin Book of Indian Nonsense Verse. The poems saw me thru a fairly dull pregnancy and everyone on board was great fun to work with.
But Vinda's genius, with its sharp, prickly images and its completely fantastic flights, has stayed with me for the longest time... I missed being taught by him at uni, but am grateful to Mike for having given me the opportunity to translate this one, among others...

Pishi Mavshi's Backyard
(Orig title: Pishi Mavshiche Parasu)

The cat digs up the backyard soil;
Pishi Mavshi sows the seeds.
They will grow as tall as her
By morning-time when darkness flees.

If the plants are taller than Pishi
Or seem shorter by a fraction,
Pishi Mavshi’ll wring their necks and
Dance deliriously to distraction.

On the jackfruit tree of Pishi
Mangoes grow in season and out
On the mangoes, guavas grow and
Banana trees on them soon sprout.

When banana bunches appear
Pishi kicks the troubled tree;
The tree starts trembling terribly and
Out pop saplings one, two, three!

The cat digs up the backyard soil,
And people say that they have seen
At high noon Pishi from a skull
Pour water on her garden green.

I wish someone would make this into a picture book. What drawings it would have! I love the image of Pishi shaking the plants' by their necks. It had n in splits too. There are a few more - funny, witty, full of mad wordplay. But Pishi with her reluctance to be liked or understood, with her profound sense of drama and trembling rage, is simply my favourite poem-person!

Here's Mike, who met Vinda while editing the book...

From The Tenth Rasa - The Penguin Book of Indian Nonsense Verse, Edited by Micheal Heyman, Anushka Ravishankar and Sumanyu S., Published by Penguin, © Penguin and Anita Vachharajani

patni prakop or the enraged wife - with reason too!

2010-01-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

Obviously, shiney ahuja is a man behind his times... or maybe salaciousness really is the oldest sin! a series of postcards from 1910. captions were helpfully in gujarati, marathi and english!

'tarun daasi' or 'the young maid servant'

'pratham darshan' or 'at first sight'

'aalingan' or 'how sweet you are!'

'chup! maari stri, maari stri! / maajhi baayko! maajhi baayko!' or 'shh! my wife, my wife!'
notice the floury prints on his coat. remember them.

'hey kaay?' or 'what is this?' remember the floury prints?

'patni prakop' or 'wife enraged'

'khota bachaav' or 'false defense' see the spilt flour on the maid's legs?

'kaadi muki' or 'rajaa dili' / 'dismissed!'

'mandharni' or 'manamanu' / 'reconciliation at last!'

'navi daasi' / 'the new servant!'

Art of the Mills

2009-12-15T21:17:00.000-08:00

Found these adverts/postcards for some of the textile mills in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Mills like Phoenix and Jubilee which exist in different avatars now... Obviously, we loved firang models even then! Some of the clothes are fittingly gujju. I bought these from a kabadi wala in junagadh...

gujju romance zindabad!

the over-the-shoulder smile of a gujju sari pehni hui mem? is she thinking fondly of theplas?

this one could be a pose from a mary cassatt painting!

sometimes, beauty is a beast!

chandani raat hogi, taaron ki baraat hogi!

the guy was going for rakish but has obviously reached evil. well, the girl's kinda saucy too.

raja-ravi-varma wannabe meets bryllcreamed sophisticate...

this one to is actually dressed a lot like my grand mom in her youth... i love the scholar-beauty look - glasses and the fancy lace-collared blouse and tiny clutch!

Amit (for a change)

‘We wanted to fill kids with the wonder of this large, complex land’

2009-12-06T04:56:00.000-08:00

An interview which appeared in the Deccan Herald of December 6, 2009

Anita & Amit Vachharajani are passionately involved with children’s literature, and the books by this writer-illustrator couple are proof of that. While Junagadh-born Amit went to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and later shifted to Mumbai to pursue a career in filmmaking, Mumbai-born Anita conducts writing workshops for children, helping them express themselves more freely. The couple, which has an enviable collection of children’s books at their home in Mumbai, has recently come up with Amazing India – A State-By-State Guide (Scholastic), a beautifully-illustrated book introducing all regions of the country in a style that will make them aware about India’s diversity in a fun way. The Vachharajanis spoke to Deccan Herald’s Utpal Borpujari on why it was important to bring out a book of this sort:

How did you conceive the idea for this book?
Scholastic USA had published a book called My World – A Country-by-country Guide, and our publisher, Scholastic India, felt that a similar book on India would be great. We began working on Amazing India about two-and-a-half years back. It’s a richly-illustrated description, covering everything from India’s forests and animals, to its peoples, arts, crafts, music, film-makers, poets, dancers, warriors and artists.

What were in your ‘do’ and ‘not to do’ lists while compiling the book considering that India has so much to offer?

What we did not want to do was give kids a book with a laundry list of facts that they would be tempted to memorise! We wanted to fill kids with the wonder of this large, complex land through an exciting and visually-rich book. We chose to present a mix of facts laced with humour, so that each child who looked at it – irrespective of his or her age and interests – would find it engaging.

How did you go about deciding what to include and what not to in the book?
For each state, we wanted some points on history, geography and ecology; some on monuments; some on people, arts, dance, music and craft; plus some facts and figures. We did focus a little more on ecology, because India’s animals, wetlands, forests, farms, rivers and mountains are all in grave danger. Of course, we kept it flexible – in Karnataka, for instance, we used the monuments built by powerful dynasties to tell the state’s story.

With every state having so much to offer, wasn’t it difficult to leave out quite a lot of info?

It’s incredible that in India, each region is so different from the other, and so full of its distinct species, land forms and cultural practices. Despite this, however, a lot of intermingling happened between the thoughts and practices of different peoples to create what we so easily call ‘Indian culture’ today. To give children a small but memorable peek into this wonderful complexity, we devoted two pages to each state, with a map, informative points, illustrations, a fact file and an arts and crafts section. Space was tight and it was really tough choosing what would go in.

How did you do the research? Did you make personal visits to the states or you relied on available information?

Ideally, we would have loved to experience every single thing we wrote about and drew, but given the wide scope of this book, that might have taken us a little over a lifetime to do. Researching it was like being back in school, but with the freedom to choose what we wanted to study! Once we spotted an interesting fact, the first step would be to cross-check it across different sources. Then we would go to the next step in the research, which was finding correct visual references.

How did you decide on the mix of the known and relatively unknown facts for the book?

We were constantly walking a fine line between what is obviously important and should go in, and what is well-known and so can be left out. We consciously chose to describe lesser-known or forgotten facts. While we did talk about known monuments like the Taj, Fatehpur Sikri, Meenakshi temple, the churches of Old Goa and Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, we also wrote about less-known things and places like the Living Root bridges of Meghalaya, the cave networks of Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya, the Neolithic cave art of Kerala and Haryana’s Saketi Fossil Park, where four-horned giraffes and giant tortoises roamed millions of years ago.

The book also indirectly encourages the targeted young readers to explore more about each region. What is the idea behind this strategy?

The whole idea behind it was that kids should get tempted to go out and learn more about the places they live in and visit. We have the do-it-yourself scrapbook pages at the end so that kids can slip into an observational mode. Hopefully, when our readers travel after going through the book, they would know what to look out for and would want to preserve their memories!

The mix of words and visuals in the book is almost 50:50. How important is visuals in a book of this nature, especially when the target audience is young?

Any factual book without arresting visuals would be a drag because visuals ensure that a child is drawn in. Drawings were a great way to make the ideas concrete for children and to help them visualize what was written. Children have a pretty sharp instinct for art and visuals. So when they see good, hand-drawn-and-coloured illustrations, they are bound to feel engaged by them. That was why why Amit actually drew over 250 drawings for this book, instead of using photos or computer-generated art.

(Published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 06-12-2009)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/39690/engaging-entertaining-educating-children-india.html

Reading the magic quilt

2009-12-04T03:35:00.000-08:00

Nonie's Magic Quilt has been reviewed in The Hindu!

Six year old Nonie refused to sleep and what did her parents do? Relate stories of every kind:
“Stories there were of little kids
who grew green grass on their lids
Tales there were of tiffin-ly fun
Of candies, cookies and cream buns
stories of princesses living in pails
stories of dragons with tricky tails

But interesting though these stories were, did our little Nonie sleep? Of course she didn't.

“Try milk” said the doctor, the teacher said “Rice”
Their cat said, “Just feed her some mice”.

As the parents grew weak with the effort of making her sleep, Nonie only got stronger.

It was decided then that this was emergency and help had to be summoned in the form of Munni, who arrives on a flying broom with a load of luggage.
She is quick to grasp the problem and sets down to work. And the solution is “The Super Sleepalicious Quilt, the X-42”.
Somu the snake, Munni's assistant, and she get down to work and exciting “ingredients” are called out for:
“The screech of a parrot, the swish of a breeze
The roar of thunder, a sigh of the seas
The tinkle of bells, the flute's tinny tune
The twinkle of a star, the silver of the moon
The wolf's howl in the dark of the night
Across the sky, the eagle's long flight…”
As all these swirl around, they are bewitched into becoming little pieces of cloth that make Nonie's quilt. And did Nonie sleep after this?

Read this delicious hilarious story Nonies Magic Quilt by Anita Vachharajani, in rhyme, to find out. Along with the lines that make you double up in laughter are the illustrations by Anitha Balachandran that sets you giggling and your imagination soaring. A “must read” as it can inspire you to set out on your own story in rhyme.

And in the Timeout:
Six-year-old Nonie has no time to sleep. After all, if she shuts her eyes, when will she laugh and play? Her parents tell her stories about princesses living in pails and dragons with tricky tails, yet she refuses to catch any shuteye. Finally, they summon Aunt Munni, who sets about making a Super Sleepalicious Quilt. This delightful story is told in verse form and is refreshingly cheeky and funny. Anitha Balachandran’s sharp and witty illustrations add colour to the poem making it a perfect bedtime story for children who are just learning to read.

Here's a link to the publisher's page.

And this email from Jenee, a friend who read Nonie out to her kids: (you can see she's been very, very kind :)

Hi Anita,
...I envy you, to take some much time to make something so nice and simple is soooo difficult. How much writing rewriting sitting with editor, convincing publisher, sitting with illustrator
Please tell Anitha that the Gandhi on the stamp is nice and mostly reminds me of Mario Miranda’s style)
The rhyming and at the same time runs like a story
What’s ‘green grass growing on the lid?’ “Bit of lunch”
‘Tight sleep’ a nice old phrase
Who named her Nonie? It’s not a common nickname I think.
The broom is kicking interest as my daughter suddenly said “Harry Potter poleya?”
Parents and adults who are reading will have to run to get dictionary and imagine really a lot with this story so kudos on that! Simply put it is worth the money and time put in while the kids will like the book itself.
Why have you named the quilt X-42?
I liked this the best
“Oh there’s always lot of room when you travel on a broom.”
and
“She plays all day, sleeps at night
Wakes up each morning, feeling bright.”

Thank you, Jenee! And of course, the reviewers at the Hindu and the Timeout.

Dhan te nan!

2009-12-04T03:01:00.001-08:00

Amazing India is finally being launched (yes, well after it has sold 7000 copies and gone into a 2nd print)! It's a quiz competition, to be held at the Hiranandani School in Powai - we will be there along with the scholastic team. See more here on the fb page and on the Scholastic site
more updates on that later!

Stick a fork in me, ’cause I’m done!

2009-10-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

Just heard from our publisher that Amazing India has sold 7000 copies! It has gone into reprint already - in just 3 short months! We are so thrilled, and a bit dazed. It’s nice to know that in just 3 months the book has managed to reach so many children. Big thanks to the folks at Scholastic for such a wonderful job – at both printing it well and at using their school network to ensure that the book was really OUT there! All we wish for now is that it would be picked up by retail stores as well.

We worked on Amazing India at a time of great personal loss and sorrow, and it was sheer grit that kept us going. But the book was also a wonderful distraction, absorbing us entirely into itself, like a dark, comforting current.

There are many reviews like the one in the Timeout, the Deccan Herald, in the CLCD, the Newshouse and Robinage.

Don't their word for it, though, and go out and order your own copy at a bookstore near you!(Some stores have it, but others need a small prod to make them procure it...)

Amazing India at the CLCD!

2009-09-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

Uma Krishnaswami, a writer and illustrator who lives in America has reviewed Amazing India for the Children's Literature Comprehensive Database.

She writes:
India is a treasure trove of diversity on almost every front—artistic, historic, cultural, linguistic, geological, ecological, and more. Here is a paperback reference book that manages to pack an incredible range of facts and figures into just over 70 pages, along with a vast array of colorful spot illustrations, maps, and “fact file” sidebars. Organized by region, each spread deals with a single state, presenting a wide range of interesting tidbits of information about it.

The spread on mountainous Himachal Pradesh, for example, mixes landform and history by telling us that Punjab’s Beas river originates in the high passes of this state, and was probably called the Hyphasis by Alexander’s soldiers “who refused to go any further east from this point.” The capital in exile of the Dalai Lama, snow leopards, Nicholas Roerich and the Roerich Pact under which countries agree not to bomb each other’s cultural monuments, and a village that claims to be the home of the world’s oldest democratic system—all these find room in two densely packed pages on this one state.

Each one of the twenty-eight states and seven Union Territories is treated in this way, so that readers can learn in quick sequence about a chariot-shaped sun temple, prehistoric rock paintings, and the endangered Olive Ridley turtle. The back matter contains additional questions for the curious as well as two consumable pages for young travelers. While some of the text in the book assumes a basic knowledge of the country, much of it, presented in an encyclopedic format, will be fascinating even to readers for whom this is new material. Presented from an Indian perspective, Amazing India offers a refreshing take on a colorful, interesting part of the world.

TO find out more about the CLCD, click here.

Our target audience approves!

2009-09-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

A book review by Sidhharth Bugtani, a 9-year-old student of PG Garodia School, Mumbai

The naming of things

2009-09-06T23:25:00.000-07:00

They watch tv together – Malayalam channels in general and Idea Star Singer, a reality show, in particular. They find the anchor woman Ranjini pretty, rivetting and yet hilarious. Her affected Malayalam accent makes them call her a ‘foreigner’. They gasp at her chandelier earrings and laugh at her ‘acting’.
The other day n came home from grandma’s and said, “Ammu’s tv isn’t working… "
"Hmm," I said, staring into my comp.
"It’s ruthless,” she added.
I looked up and asked, “What? Ruthless?”
Amit, overhearing us from his desk, said, “Ruthless? But how can a tv…”
“Yeah,” she said dismissively, continuing to fiddle with the scab on her knee, “Fully ruthless, it is.”
Mom had been complaining about her tv and how it was on its last legs. Maybe n meant it wasn’t working and was therefore tormenting her? Ruthless that way? My child was a po-et and I didn’t know-et?
This morning while having breakfast, from out of the blue, she said sleepily, “I told you, no, Ammu’s tv is ruthless. It's not that. It's hopeless. It’s a hopeless tv.”
Ah, I see. The penny drops.

come here, i say!

2009-08-14T03:01:00.000-07:00

since no one will ever accuse me of being too feminine, and since n is growing up to be smthing of a geek, i find i have no problems with feminine tropes the school sometimes explores for festivals like janmashtami. [though i must say i also loved the fact that on rakhi, teachers tied cheerful thread for them all - n's had a rabbit on it - and then said, 'thank you, dear sisters' to n and her kind. having sat and made the rakhis with the boys, the girls would have been cheesed off if none had been tied on, i guess.]

anyway, this is the song they were supposed to be dancing to today.

said in a sweetly sing-song voice:

come here, my dear, krishna-kanhaiyya,
maine tere liye hriday mein hai
mandir banaya
dudh, dahi, maakhan hai tere liye banaya.

there must be more of this poetry - there has to be - but it has been forgotten in the school-less days. they had learnt 'steps and stuff' as n calls it. walking like gopis - one hand on head, one on waist, and with a lachak (or a wiggle). and shocked finger-wagging towards young krishna + throwing / dropping of the cardboard matki or pot when he thows a paper ball. 'anju teacher' had been making the cardboard pots and colouring them too. (another note will someday be written on how much these teachers slog man, how much cutting and sticking they must do, for example!)

for some reason, young krishna had been told to cover his eyes in anger and then open them. there must be some deep stuff here, only our eavesdropping gopi seems to have forgotten the details.

Our 15 seconds!

2009-08-09T05:05:00.000-07:00

Interview with the Scholastic newsletter, conducted by Rahul Vij of Class X, The Lawrence School Sanawar, about the process of writing 'Amazing India'.

Anita Vachharajani was born in Mumbai and grew up in a neighbourhood that smelled faintly of molasses. Despite having a childhood devoted almost entirely to books and sweets, she loves nature and is an eco-enthusiast. Apart from writing for children, Anita has also translated nonsense verse and traditional stories. Her stories have appeared in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories and her translations feature in The Tenth Rasa: the Penguin Book of Indian Nonsense Verse. Anita takes writing workshops for children and focuses on helping them express themselves more freely.

Amit Vachharajani was born in Junagadh in Gujarat and spent a lot of his childhood reading, doodling and going to nature camps. He studied briefly at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad but got bitten by the film bug and moved to Mumbai for a career in film-making. Apart from illustrating for magazines and children’s books, Amit also works with international documentary film crews. He has illustrated two books for Scholastic The Mystery of the Secret Hair-oil Formula and Grandpa fights an Ostrich and other Animal stories. His other books are The Puffin Book of Funny Stories and The Shepherd Boy, a Ladybird Favourite Tale.
Anita and Amit live in Mumbai with their daughter and more books than they can handle.

In conversation with Rahul Vij, Class X, The Lawrence School Sanawar

Rahul: What kind of research did you have to undertake to bring forth facts and figures about every part of India? Did you visit all these places?

Anita: Doing the research for this book was like re-discovering the wonder and magic of the Indian subcontinent. It was like going back to history and geography classes, except that this time we could choose what we wanted to learn – and we could have fun doing so! Ideally, we would have loved to experience every single thing we wrote about and drew, but given the wide scope of this book, that might have taken us a little over a lifetime to accomplish.

So we decided to focus on material from multiple sources: encyclopedias and books; the official Government of India websites on each state; and finally, the human source – where we would simply call up friends or researchers living in each state and ask for confirmation on the facts that we found. We checked and re-checked each piece of information many times.

But gathering the information was just one aspect – presenting it was the greater challenge. Because, you see, we didn’t want Amazing India to be just a collection of dry facts and figures. Each person or place, animal or forest that we read about, opened up our minds a bit more to the sheer diversity of India, to its vast landscape, its variety of people and ecologies, and its truly inclusive spirit. So more than just list out plain facts, we wanted to share the excitement of living in a country with so much diversity, and so many natural and man-made treasures in it.

Rahul:You must have collected thousands of facts about each place, how tough was it to condense and present them all it in a double-spread for each place?

Anita: Yes, we had lots and lots of details. Imagine that the Indian subcontinent’s artistic, ecological and historical heritage is part of a huge maze of knowledge, facts, legend and history. We wanted to offer you a peek in – one that would hopefully make you curious to look harder and deeper for yourself!

But we also had to work within the restrictions of the page size. The text, the map, the table, the illustrations, the arts and crafts section – all had to fit in. Deciding how much information we could use, on which topics, was a constant struggle. For example, do you know the famous Lalbagh Gardens of Bangalore? They were laid out in 1760 by Hyder Ali. Between fighting various battles against the British, his son Tipu Sultan painstakingly collected different species of plants for this botanical garden from Afghanistan, Persia and France. Later, Indian and British horticulturists added to it. This was such a lovely nugget because that garden is still visited by every tourist in Bangalore. It had to be dropped, unfortunately, but we managed to squeeze in the fact that Tipu was the first to send for silk worms from Bengal and start 21 centres to develop Karnataka’s silk industry.

We wanted to create something exciting and visually rich, and so we chose to present a mix of facts, laced with a bit of humour. It bothered us that history, art, culture, geography and ecology are usually presented very dully in our books. Our aim was that each child who looked at Amazing India – irrespective of his or her age and interests – should find something engaging, attractive and useful in it. We did focus a little more on ecology, though, because in India today, animals, wetlands, forests, farms, rivers and mountains are all in grave danger.

Rahul:How long did it take you to put this book together?

It took us about two and a half years, between researching the information, doing the visual research, the writing, the drawing and the designing.

Rahul:How did you come up with the idea of using a ‘?’ sign for any new fact that would raise the reader’s curiosity?

Anita: I was simply curious about some terms. I didn’t really know –technically and precisely – what a national park, a biosphere reserve, a wetland, a world heritage site, a Buddhist chaitya or a vihara were. I didn’t know exactly what Project Tiger did, or how an ape was different from a monkey. And I certainly didn’t know how a monolith was different from a dolmen – though, as it turned out, there are monoliths, megaliths, menhirs and dolmens all over the Indian subcontinent.
And I imagined that if it was tough for me, it would be tough for my readers too. Which is why a small reference section at the back made sense. The choice of the ‘?’ mark as an icon was easy – after all, at the bottom of all our knowledge is the need to ask questions!

It was also a sneaky way to pack in more. For example, when I was trying to understand what exactly a wetland was, I read that mangrove species which grow in wetlands play a key role in keeping seaside cities safe from erosion and floods. The Ramsar Convention held way back in 1971 in Iran recognized the importance of wetlands and mangroves, and worked towards preserving them. I wanted to share this fact with readers, but there was no way to do so within any one state. The ‘Are you curious?’ page became a nice space for slightly more detailed explanations.

Rahul:The illustrations, I am told have been drawn and coloured by hand; you have blended facts with imagination beautifully. Have you professionally trained in art and design? How long have you been in this field?

Amit: Yes, all the illustrations are hand-drawn and hand-colored. I used pen-and-ink and watercolors. Illustrating this book was a huge challenge. There was a lot of visual research to do – finding a clear and correct reference and drawing each picture so that it would be interesting and yet accurate.

Though my natural instinct is to make funny illustrations, this book required a realistic style. Sometimes I would get bored with drawing realistically and we decided to find some facts which would need funny drawings so that the book would also become more interesting. If you take a look again, you’ll find that the Koli and the film-star dancing in Maharashtra, the hippie running towards Goa, the tiger mask in the Sunderbans, the tiger and the ghost in Sariska, the boys at the Wazwan and the Manikaran Springs, are all drawn in my favourite cartoon style.

I have always loved to draw and drove my teachers crazy by doodling constantly – till I landed up at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad after school. I was there for two years and learnt a lot about art, conceptualizing ideas and of course the basics of drawing. After NID I ended up taking film making as my profession and didn’t pick up the brush for years till I met Anita and got interested in children’s books. She encouraged me to draw once again. Over the past eight years we have worked on some books together. I have also collaborated with other writers.

Rahul:I like the book cover very much. How did you decide what must go on the cover? How long did it take you to design it?

Amit: It’s great to know that the cover caught your eye. I put a lot of thought into what it should look like and tried many ideas on paper. The most important thing about the cover was that it had to be visually attractive and had to have a promise of what was inside the book. Above all it had to be inviting enough to make a child want to open it. Once I had the design, the fonts and the background color in place, putting in the illustrations did not take much time. The cover must not have taken me more than two to three days from idea to final design. The tough part was choosing which of our favourite illustrations would go on the cover. Those favourites that did not make it to the cover got their place on the title page and in the introduction.

Rahul:Do you plan to do any more such books in future? If yes, what theme would you choose next?

Anita and Amit: Anita is writing for two anthologies and has four picture books coming out this year. One of them – Nonie’s Magic Quilt – has just been published. It is a completely crazy story told as a poem and has been illustrated beautifully. She has written stories about ghostly grandmas, elephants, lost owls and others. Amit is in fact illustrating two of her picture books. Doing informative books like Amazing India is very, very hard work, and though writing fiction is challenging too, it’s a lot easier in terms of actual footwork. Having said that, we do have an exciting idea for an informative book – again on India – so watch out for it!

here's international children's writer uma krishnaswami on amazing india in her blog. she'll be reviewng it a little later...

Read more reviews here.

We've been read!

2009-07-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

By the good people at Timeout, Mumbai
Amazing India – A State-By-State Guide Ages 8+
"This is no ordinary geography atlas. Kids can read about subjects as wide-ranging as wazwan, the 36-course meal in Jammu and Kashmir, “scraptures” in Chandigarh and filmstar Rajnikanth in Tamil Nadu. Amazing India celebrates the diversity of our 28 states and seven union territories not just with facts and figures, but through cultural anecdotes, legends and trivia. Most of the factoids are accompanied by striking illustrations, and will have children spouting sentences starting with “did you know...” for weeks after."

And the good people at The Deccan Herald
Amazing India – A State-By-State Guide By Anita and Amit Vachharajani, Scholastic, Pp 72.
"This book does a good job of condensing the essence of the natural, cultural and historical wonders of our homeland into simple, brief capsules. Each state has two pages of devoted fact files, and brief notes on history, natural beauty and cultural heritage. These tantalising snippets of information will encourage young readers to read more books, watch films and actually travel to learn more about the places and facts that they find most interesting. Did you know that a "Chaitya is a large prayer hall made of rock and teak wood, with an apse or a half-dome-shaped gap at one end? Karla and Bhaja caves, in Maharashtra, have large and elaborate chaityas." Read this book to learn the difference between the terms Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.

"Learn about wetlands, biosphere reserves, the Bhavai folk theatre of Gujarat, the rare and endangered red panda of Sikkim, and more. There are pages for young readers to stick their own personal photographs and notes about interesting places they have visited. The colourful illustrations on each page are instructive and lively. Handy and easy to read and remember, books such as these can also be a great guide for impromptu quizzes and other activities."

And there was a tiny review in the DNA as wel, but can't seem to find it online...
:)
If this doesn't inspire you to run out and grab yerself a copy...

An interview with us by a student.

Here's more about what it was for us to work on the book, if you like to read that sort of thing.

Yes, Virginia, dreams do come true! Or, YAAAYYYY!

2009-07-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

There are healthy ambitions, and then there are those you should worry about. Like my old, old, old one of writing picture books for children in India and hoping to have them published. About 10 years back when I first began taking my manuscripts around, editors would smile indulgently when we mentioned the words 'picture books'. It wouldn't work, their marketting guys would invariably say, and that would be the end of it. (Of course it didn’t help matters that my stories themselves weren’t so great!)

Over the years though, more and more Indian picture books have begun peeking out of shelves in stores. About a year and a half back, I was directed by a friend (thanks, Arthy!) to Saraswathy Rajagopalan, the editor at Tumbi Books, Kerala, who was coming out with original, Indian picture books. Luckily for me, she liked this long story-poem of mine, and felt it would make a nice read. They got one of my favourite children's illustrators, Anitha Balachandran, to draw it. The book – which was expected to come out in September – suddenly turned up today!

We opened it excitedly, and as usual, Anitha's done a wonderful job. She's captured the spirit - the fun, the mischief - of the poem so well, it's amazing. It's like she was sitting next to me while I was writing the poem, chortling with me and planning what all she could draw in. Which never happened of course - we've never met or even mailed - so well, hats off to her! She's drawn in details I’d never thought of, adding a whole new layer to the text. I also personally like the way she brings in real things - tiny details, like a stamp or a bit of a newspaper - to give the page a lovely, slightly scratchy and tactile quality.

The story itself was inspired by N, who becomes Nonie in the poem. Nonie refuses to sleep - she plays, runs and generally never tires. But her parents are exhausted. So mum sends for a magical cousin, who arrives in a swish of beads, colours and baggage which leaps and moves with life. She hints at flying on a broom, and whips out a snake - Somu - to measure Nonie for a magical quilt. As a poem it's great fun, and thanks to Anitha, it's now visually magical too!

Sorry if I sound a bit breathless - apart from the fact that the book's looking lovely, for me the fact that my mad dream of doing a picture book has come true is a bit overwhelming.

Tumbi Books are available in most bookstores, I think, and if you don't find the book the first time, do make a request for it with the sales staff. It might make them want to procure the books!

Gimme hope, Liberhan, gimme hope!

2009-07-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

It’s strange that my memories of the years leading up to Dec 6, 1992 and the bloodbath that followed have sort of frozen into one sharp image which in itself isn’t particularly remarkable. We lived in a primarily upper class unstatedly Hindu locality, but of course, had secular thoughts and beliefs, which were slowly, slowly being questioned on a daily basis in the papers and in the news.

One day, waiting at the dhobi’s – Kismet Laundry – staring up at the stickers of devis, ‘good luck’ and ‘sceneries’ or strange posters of a park in Thailand as he tied up our clothes, my friend and I were startled to see a new sticker, orange in colour, full of swastiks and trishuls stuck on the beam above the shop. It said, ‘Garv se kaho hum Hindu hai’. We were embarrassed and a bit angry. My friend got into a conversation with him, her voice starting to get shrill and both our faces tight with disapproval. Recognizing hysterics when he saw them, the dhobi smiled laconically and sniggered and gave our anger a cold shoulder. Politic and measured, he just kept smiling at our annoying yapping. Finally, swallowing some paan spittle, he snarled, “Aage aage dekho kya hoga...”

Those years were full of these conversations where fissures appeared even as people spoke. It was like every second person had a personal stake in the Ram Janmabhoomi non-issue. Malayalee expat relatives from the Gulf, who by all rights should resent a daft Aryan agenda, suddenly turned belligerently and militantly Hidnu in their words. They were full of anti-Arab feeling, I guess, and every time they landed here, exuding an air of poshness, they would pronounce that it was time to ‘teach the fellows a lesson’, coolly forgetting that it’s one thing to hate your rich Arab boss, and totally another to want to unleash genocide on a large part of this country’s citizens.

Then suddenly one morning – on the 6th December – the unimaginable happened. The hate that Advani and gang had been steadily pushing us towards sort of erupted in the destruction of a heritage structure. I couldn’t believe they had done it, I couldn’t believe they had gotten away with it, and I couldn’t believe the spiral of hatred that we descended into.

One of our neighbours – a wealthy Marathi lady whose daughter had sung Catholic hymns and secular songs with the rest of us in school – made a little moue as she said, “Good ya, high time someone showed these Muslims good.” It distressed me that she was a school teacher, someone with access to kids on whom she could inflict her hatred.

I feel the whole progressiveness of the ’70s and the ’80s was carefully demolished by that single party and its determination to make a non-issue into something it could win an election with. It’s taken the Indian polity what, 30 years, to give the BJP the kind of trouncing it deserved? I’m not a great one for karma, but for every innocent’s death, I hope Advani, Joshi, Bal Thackeray and that gang of wretched fundamentalists writhes in a hell fire made specially for them. Or as my mother put it one day – wish someone would chop off their family jewels and put them in the sun to rot and die.

The thing with this sot of fissuring of a populace is that it serves your immediate goal of winning an election. It creates a need out of nothing – the standard practice of good advertising – and then where that need takes you, into what sort of despair and grief and trauma, it doesn’t care. But coming back to the fissuring – it doesn’t just end with religion, does it? I mean after you’ve take the whole Muslims-are-bad thing to its logical conclusion, you start needing more enemies. Marathis, then? Or maybe as we’ve seen in Mumbai, non-Marathis? Bhaiyyas, perhaps? Madrasis, maybe? Or how about Gujjus? Sindhis? Parsis? Catholics?

The MNS worked with a Marathi theatre group on a play called Bhaiyya haath-pair pasare about a dhobi who began by ironing in the landing of a building and went on to own the building one day, thanks to his industry and his native cunning. I’d like to meet the dhobi from Kismet all those years back. He’s a father of three now, managing a paan shop next to the laundry and a middle-aged paunch. I’d like to ask him if he had any stickers about how proud he was to be an Uttar Pradeshi Hindu in a city which was suddenly finding his kind uncomfortably competitive.

But that’s really asking the wrong guy for answers. I mean, all he did was put up a sticker. If a mob attacks tomorrow, chances are this poor guy will lose his life’s savings and his limbs. Safe in their homes, spouting hate, thinking votes will be the idiot ideologues, the Advanis, the Sudheendra Kulkarnis, the Manmohan Joshis, the Raj Thackerays, the Balasahebs.

Thank god the Liberhan Commission has blamed them squarely – the hate-spewing BJP morons and the dozing fiddlers like Narasimha Rao and Kalyan Singh. But more than the Commission’s finding, the trouncing of the BJP at the elections gives me hope. It means the sort of slap in the face that seasoned politicians like Advani and Modi and Jaitley can sort of begin to feel!

Oh, and all those who plan to leave nasty, anonymous, pro-Hindutva comments? You can be quite sure I won't be publishing them, especially if they contain the word 'pseudo-secular'. If anything, I think the secular agenda is the only one that isn't pseudo. I mean, in a country of such staggering poverty and so much social injustice, what can be more pseudo than raking up a mythological figure who may or may not have lived and fighting over his birthplace? It doesn't get any more false!

After many a ghisaai

2009-06-28T00:53:00.000-07:00

If you passed by Chembur in the months from January to mid-May, you probably saw two people lying in a heap on the benches of diamond garden. If they looked exhausted and bitter and were muttering angrily at one another, that was probably me and Amit. We weren't going through a Giant Marital Crisis, though it sometimes did feel like that, but were working on wrapping up this book, this product of our two-year-toil which we now 'umbly present to you!

In case you're wondering, it's a book on the states of India - the 28 states and 7 union territories, to be precise. One doublespread, or two pages are devoted to each state. Each spread has a map, important facts on the state, and about 10 or 12 interesting things about it - covering aspects as vast as the history and geography of the state, its stories, its monuments, its dances, and its forests, national parks, biosphere reserves and endangered or special animals, if any. There are also about two to three indigenous art and craft forms which are described for each state. Each spread has about 12 illustrations by Amit, drawn and coloured by hand.

Our focus was basically to pique a reader's interest about this large and diverse country, to help them springboard into a deeper awareness of India. So we tried to stay off the beaten path as much as possible, tried to find and highlight issues that are rarely discussed in books on India for kids. Like the rebellions fought against the British by tribals in Central India prior to 1857. Or the story of how Islam, Judaism and Christianity reached Kerala. Or how Paithani saris of Maharashtra were often designed by Princess Niloufar, the daughter-in-law of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Often we'd find this uber-cool fact, but not be able to back it up; or having backed it up, not be able to find a visual reference. If finding the information was tough, then letting go of some of it was even tougher. Picture this: on a spread with a map and about 12 to 13 nice, colourful drawings, plus a table of facts, how much room do you think text is going to get? So no colourful and scintillating metaphors, no extended descriptions, just the bare minimum prose, cut to a crisp.

Choosing what to put in was a huge struggle, and it meant some tough choices... Like, being a malayali, i felt that any TV commercial on Kerala would tell you about the Thrissur Pooram, but what about Edakkal caves and its neolithic carvings in the forests of Wayanad, that even I didn't know about? And what about the fact that that the Koodiyattam dance form, 2000 years old, was deemed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by the UNESCO? Not to forget Silent Valley or Sairandhiri Vanam, home to the lion-tailed macaque, saved from being made into a hydro-electricity project by conservationists?

So it was a continuous fight not just with ourselves, but also with the limitations of the software we were working with (the slightest text change, of an adn to an and would be enough to hide a word behind a drawing somewhere else on the spread) and the exhaustion we were feeling thanks to being so sleep-deprived.

Now, seeing this book in technicolour, it sort of makes us forget those months of exhaustion and bitter mutterings. Sort of like having a baby and forgetting those 9 wretched months of puking and gas. And labour.

So yes, please say Hello to our new baby and try to meet her at a bookstore or a Scholastic exhibition near you!

An interview with us by a student.
Read reviews here.

PollyAunty

2009-05-24T03:57:00.000-07:00

once upon a time, my clothes never matched. they still don't but that's more of an accident than the style-statement it once was. when i was 21, i believed in something vague like a sense of rhythm in your over-all look rather than matching colours. so if the light greeny-blue bead on an earring you wore sort of resonated with the dots of bluey-green on the white block print of your purple salwar, which in turn 'went' with the bottle green trim on the blue kurta you were wearing, you were home safe. i think youth is a lovely concealer, so it didn't matter what one wore - thick jute like block prints and lots of bangles, etc. - it all sort of came together, glued firmly by youthful confidence. when well-coordinated older cousins complained that i was SO mismatched, all i did was smile. i tended to imagine that i was throwing them into a muddle of serious envy and self-doubt.

back then i had an older friend who was fat, a mother-of-one and terribly unhpappy in her marriage. i'm very very ashamed to admit now that it used to bother me a bit that her clothes matched ane - shudder - were made of cotton blends and even synthetics. it surprised me back then because she was SUCH a bright, funny woman otherwise. and i thought EVERYone knew that bright, funny, sexy people's clothes DON'T match, and were made of natural fabrics! her clothes had laces and embroidery and trims and fusses, and matching dupattas, and were all very proper.

i'd look at those sleek bizzy-lizzy kurtas, the sad attempt at streamlining with discretely embroidered terrycot nighties, and wonder when she would grow some taste again... to me, high on life, wearing thick maroon jute with black block print in a bombay summer, her choice of blends and sometimes 100% synthetic fabrics was not just pointless and shocking and vaguely morally reprehensible, it was also just so sad.

17 years, one kid and a weight gain of 20 kgs later, i find there's been a slight shift in perspective. at the shops yesterday to buy myself some ok togs before i hit amit's home town, i found myself doing the unimaginable - straying cheerfully towards the bizzy-lizzys, the terrycots, the downright synthetics. where once i would have dripped disdain, i admired the colours, the patterns. because i get out so little, the sheer clevernesses in fabrics boggles me in shops. i get giddy from the prices, the prints and the textures.

boggled and giddy as i am, though, it doesn't stop me from trying to match in order to contract the silhouette a bit. those same pathetic attempts to mask the burgeoning bod with pollyester are made... bizzy-lizzy, a thickish blend, is my new friend. it is a wee bit flattering - in that it doesn't make up its own little bulgy lies unlike thicker cotton, and it doesn't quite glimmer and flow like synthetic either. but that's my range these days - bizzy lizzy, to the odd paisley-printed 100%synthetic, to thinner, finer cottons simply because i still can't resist block prints that run colour with every wash and will eventually become as comfortable second skin... i steer clear of the 'thick' cottons, getting totally seduced by the supposedly slimming fluidity of the synthetic.

but i do try and put up a fight with myself. i stand at the counter, biting my lip, wasting the poor shop man's time, wondering about the heat, the sweat and the 'immorality' of it all somehow (don't ask me why, but buying synthetic has always seemed morally a bit suspect to me). of course i succumb and buy the lot eventually. sigh... how the sartorially advanced have swollen and become pollyester-punjabi-dress-wrapped auntyjis...

this, from my favourite doonesbury, speaks of youth and age so well... it's about a middle-aged woman being sent to recruit a young male fbi agent. i think her reaction would be mine...

so many comments, so little heart

2009-04-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

the post below and the related one on olive ridley turtles have seen such a buzz of angry comments, it's not funny. it's dire actually. so many people wrote about 'obscure little animals in wetlands' and how it was time to ignore greenpeace and support the tatas. so much anger, so many anonymous comments (some which sounded suspiciously like they were from tech-and-blog-savvy staff at the port itself). this after the singur fiasco.
and hardly a comment or two from the other side. makes you realize that in these as in most other matters that seem to capture our country's imagination, the only people who stand up to be counted are the upper class, right wing, pro-destruction sorts.
sad really...

so much for corporations that care...

2009-03-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

This came in a mail... Sad, isn't it?

Greenpeace India:
We've been trying to reach Mr. Ratan Tata for weeks now but to no avail, forcing us to release an ad in the two newspapers he subscribes to, Financial Times and International Herald Tribune. Have a look at it[high quality:http://greenpeace.in/turtle/images/ad.jpg] and help us get it published in all editions of prominent Indian newspapers by the end of this week. http://www.greenpeace.org/india/supportus/support-nano-turtle-ad

their facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greenpeace-India/30290552843

and here is a link to our older post on the ridley issue.

Coloured Pictures

2009-01-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this for the November 2008 issue of The Book Review - an article on classics among children's books - stuff that left an impact on my mind, as well as picture books I wish I'd seen when I was a kid. Here there are a few tweaks and illustrations you won't see in the original!)

Among my first ‘friends’ in the world of books were two Russian girls named Masha and Zhenya. While Masha was resourceful and clever, with a ready wit, Zhenya was more me: a bit greedy, a bit dull, and definitely careless. Masha was to be admired, while Zhen ya—so much like me—was just accepted. In case you haven’t guessed already, my ‘friends’ were characters in Soviet picture books which seemed to dominate the Indian children’s book scene in the ’60s and ’70s. Delightfully written (and translated), beautifully drawn and designed, they were cheap even for the time. Their illustrations covered a breathtaking range from the detailed, jewel-bright Russian-folk-style rendering, to pellucid watercolours, and impossibly scraggly black-and-white lines. If there is one thing I can blame for my abiding desire to look at and hoard children’s picture books, it has to be those bits of Soviet-era publishing.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote in a book he gifted a child:

…Stand up and keep your childishness:

Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;

But don’t believe in anything

That can’t be told in coloured pictures.

There is a curious sort of cyclicality in finding these words—I love Chesterton’s crime-busting Father Brown series. And Chesterton is supposed to have written the above words as part of a longer inscription in a book of Randolph Caldecott’s illustrations. Interestingly enough, Caldecott (1846–1886) a British artist and cartoonist, drew 16 picture books for children, which were subversive and highly textured, and went on to inspire generations of artists.

But picture-book illustrations are really more than just coloured pictures. As a writer of children’s stories and a mother, I think the illustrations in a picture book are supremely important. Primarily because they add another layer to the text—one that the non-literate child often ‘reads’ by herself. In the best picture books—where illustrations mischievously suggest more than is said by the actual words—this second level often breaks the fetters of the first. Not only do they create a playful other dimension, but illustrations also extend the frames of reference for a child, creating associations and levels of meaning that would be uneconomical if done with words.

When I read out or tell a story to children, I know that what is grabbing their eyes, making the words ‘real’ and enchanting for them, is the artist’s version of it. Of course the story is paramount, but the drawings are actually the bridge that takes the story to them. I’ve grown to understand that illustrating for kids is as much and perhaps more difficult than writing for them. The same rules of thumb apply: don’t talk down to your reader / viewer; be mad; be good; and most importantly, be a bit bad.

There is an essential and perennial confusion in the world of children’s books—what adults feel children should read versus what children themselves enjoy reading or seeing. This confusion—which enters the world of illustration as well—is a path both publishers and parents have to negotiate delicately. While there have to be the ‘good’ stories—the fables, the pedagogic tales, the ‘useful’ books, there also has to be enough of the mischievous, the naughty, the merrily subversive. Take Punch cartoonist E.H. Shepard, whose black-and-white, scratchy, seemingly-rough drawings were not considered the best choice for Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by A.A. Milne. Milne still agreed to have him draw When we were very young (1924) and was so delighted, that he went on to commission him for the Pooh books as well. Pooh bear—inspired by Milne’s son’s toy in the story and by ‘Growler’, Shepard’s son Graham’s toy, in the illustrations—was captured by an artfully rough style (in fact you can see Growler/Pooh's precursor at the bottom right of the b&w drawing here). The stories and their endearing characters went on to enthrall generations of children (till, that is, the Disney machinery swept in with their trademark yellow-and-red bear, a far cry from the homely toy of Shepard’s imagination). Shepard was to extend his subtle ‘roughness’ to create far busier visuals for Kenneth Grahame’s timeless The Wind in the Willows (1931).

One of my favourites (though I must admit it took me time to realize that) has always been Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline books. Written and drawn by Bemelmans, Madeline (1939)—illustrated in a flat, uni-dimensional style, largely in black-and-white with a studied and painterly abandon—was considered too sophisticated for children. At first glance the visuals do seem forbidding—but one reading down, most children are glued to the fast-paced rhyming narrative and the seemingly off-hand illustration style.

The very spare classic Goodnight Moon (1947) by Margaret Wise Brown was illustrated in a rich yet somewhat muted style by Clement Hurd. ‘Goodnight’ is said to each thing in an anthropomorphized baby rabbit’s room. As a parent you can recognize the love for rituals that children have, and with subsequent readings, will sense how the book actually helps unwind. Goodnight … slowly reveals its illustrative richness—little details are noticed by the child in the ‘clean’ artwork, and a lot happens independent of the words. A tiny mouse, for instance, appears on every page, and children have fun spotting it.

When it comes to the mischievous-yet-delightful in children’s books, practically nothing can beat Theodore Geisel’s oeuvre, written and illustrated by him as Dr Seuss and sometimes as LeSeig. When asked by his publisher to create a picture book for children using less than 250 words, Geisel took 9 months to create the completely farout The Cat in the Hat (1957). A cat in a red-and-white striped top-hat drops in on a pair of unsuspecting siblings, and tries to entertain them while turning their house upside down, much to the consternation of their pet goldfish. It was funny, riveting, and literally ‘… a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot’ (Ellen Goodman). The Cat … was published under the imprint of ‘Beginner Books’ and much more literary mayhem was to follow.

As a parent and a writer, I marvel at the stunning simplicity of Geisel’s words, and at the vivid madness in his minimalist books. Geisel is in turn funny (as in the very basic Hop on Pop), crazy (as in Green Eggs and Ham, Mr Brown Can Moo, The Eye Book, The Tooth Book and Wacky Wednesday) and sometimes even political (like in Horton Hears a Who). Beginner Books went on to publish many fantastic titles by other artists and writers as well—the laugh-inducing Put Me in the Zoo (1960), written and illustrated by Robert Lopshire, is just one.

Eric Carle is another innovative children’s illustrator whose work simply refuses to conform to adult notions of ‘child-friendly’. With a background in graphic design and advertising, Carle created colourful books out of collage, using layers of hand-painted paper, that are stylish and yet earthy. Beginning with Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What can you see? (1967), he went on to create many classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) and The Grouchy Ladybug (1977).

A British artist who caused something of a paradigm shift in how publishers and parents would view illustrations forever was Quentin Blake. His seemingly casual, scratchy sketches have brought so many of Roald Dahl’s stories to life (The Enormous Crocodile of 1978 is a perennial favourite) that children often think he writes the books as well. Blake’s delightful illustrations have a breathless quality, and he has not only drawn books, but also written some like Mr Magnolia (1980), Fantastic Daisy Artichoke, (1999) and the Mrs. Armitage series.

The thing with children is that they recognize immediacy and sincerity in art. So whether or not a picture is ‘good’ by adult standards, a child’s response to art that grabs him is usually quick and instinctive. Often a book that I think will scare my daughter or alienate her, in fact ends up appealing to her the most. Artists, I conclude, must know something about her responses that I don’t!

Tuesday (1991) by David Wiesner and The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher (1980) by Molly Bang—both Caldecott Honor Awards winners—were startling examples of this. Tuesday is a wordless book, where you build the narrative as you go, finding new details and images with every reading. Just before 9 p.m on a Tuesday, near a marsh in small-town America, some phlegmatic frogs sitting on lily pads begin to fly. Startled, the frogs grow dizzy with the thrill of flying. When dawn comes they slowly float down and have to hop back to their marsh where—understandably—they sulk. On the last page, at the same time next Tuesday, pigs begin to rise.

It was a book I was sure would terrify my toddler. It had a quiet eeriness to it and the painstakingly rendered frogs were not your average picture-book froggies. But she found it riveting, enjoying the sheer craziness of the story and laughing at the frogs’ glee. The novelty came from discovering a new frog in the swarm, a new expression, and a new detail with every reading.

If Wiesner came as a surprise, then Molly Bang’s The Grey Lady … was a shocker. A wordless book again, it ‘tells’ of an old lady who buys a basket of strawberries for her family. Leaving the shop, she is followed by the ‘Snatcher’, a skinny, gangly-limbed blue-coloured man wearing a yellow-and-purple shawl and a red hat. Deviously, he follows the Grey Lady, making many grabs for her basket.

The Lady dashes into buses, hides in a swamp, climbs a tree, swings from a vine, and finally escapes the relentless Snatcher only by a last-minute authorial intervention. Fed up, he spots a mulberry bush, and eats enough to have his hair stand up on end in a blissful, orange afro.

The challenge of the book is not just the fear of the chasing Snatcher, but the fact that Bang uses a complex narrative style. The same page has the characters in two different positions—before and after an event. Surprisingly, kids actually get Bang’s complicated shifting of perspective and her elliptical story-telling device. Surprisingly, they seem to like rather than fear the Snatcher.

It took Bang two-and-a-half years to illustrate the book. When it came out, it was panned by critics as being ‘too flashy’ and ‘weird’. When Bang won the Caldecott, she writes, she was surprised and asked a committee member if they had read the reviews. The member replied, ‘We don’t make our decisions based on reviews.’

In India too, we have illustrators who regularly tore out of the sweet confines of the artistic envelope. Sukumar Ray—Satyajit Ray’s father—probably pioneered the movement for deliciously mad illustrations in his still-popular Abol-tabol (1923), a collection of nonsense verse. Much later, Shankar, an amazing artist, wrote and drew many books in his bold and effortless style. R.K. Laxman’s illustrations for Kamala Laxman’s Thama (1975) series brought alive an endearing baby elephant.

Target, a children’s magazine, seemed to attract the best talent in the ’80s, with illustrators like Atanu Roy, whose richly intricate lines were dramatic and nutty; Ajit Ninan who drew the hilarious, pot-bellied Detective Moochwala; and Jayanto Banerjee, whose Gardhab Das, the donkey-musician, perennially plagued us with his lousy singing.

Mario Miranda’s quirky, whimsical and sometimes even serious sketches in our Class 2 English reader left a huge impression. I’ve forgotten much of what I learnt, but his fat, funny, robust illustrations for Dhondu and the Rotten Eggs, and his solemn turn for a travel piece on Goa from the same book, are still fresh in my mind.

So the next time you want to pick up a picture book for your child, explore a bit and try to find exciting artists—the ones mentioned above are at the extreme, outermost tip of the iceberg. Look a little deeper and there’s a whole world of picture-book illustrators out there (flapping about like eager penguins, perhaps?), just waiting to be discovered and enjoyed!

two worlds in one city

2008-12-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

i remember when there was just the times of india, when it's moron-like obsession with the rich was beginning to grate on my nerves. after feeling like a shredded cabbage in pain for the longest time, i switched to the indian express which was kind of substantial but still a bit thin for my taste. i used to rant against newspapers at large. i still do, but now i have a choice - all papers have their problems, but at least the Hindustan Timeses and the Indian Expresses of the world offer deeper stories.

i never thought i'd find my peace with newspapers, but in the face of the annoying, grubby faces of arnav goswami, his lizard henchman (you know the thin, fair guy, i never seem to catch his name), barkha dutt and the like, print - whatever it says - seems a lot more comforting, inclusive and thoughtful.

and then you come across something like this; something that sorts of puts its finger exactly where your pulse is pounding, and you thank the good lord for newspapers.

though we watched the program with daft wanker simi garewal mentioned below and saw her saying all this, there was nothing we could do except stare open-mouthedly. and wonder why no one from the audience or panel jumped up and pulled her by her hair-sprayed bouffant till she shrieked. well, trust a paper to find the space to do so nicely, politely, crisply.

over to mukul kesavan, in an article for The Telegraph called: The Mumbai tragedy and the English language news media:

“Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums around you. Do you know what flags you will see? Not the Congress’s, not the BJP’s, not the Shiv Sena’s. Pakistan! Pakistani flags fly high!... You know what I think? We should carpet-bomb Pakistan. That’s the only way we can give a clear message.”

Simi Garewal later apologized for this little outburst on the television show, We, the People. She said she had mistaken Muslim flags for Pakistani ones. She had a harder time explaining away her ‘carpet bombing’ prescription. She claimed that she had meant to suggest a covert attack like the below-the-radar missions Americans so often undertake in Pakistan’s borderlands. Carpet-bombing is hard to do discreetly, but we shouldn’t make too much of this because the point isn’t Simi Garewal and her gaffe: it’s the way the English language news media covered the Mumbai tragedy.

The idiom of the coverage of the terror attack on Mumbai was in part shaped by the need to say something, anything, in the face of horror and evil. The need to voice not just their own feelings but the need to be a proxy for the People, to anticipate and echo a public revulsion, seemed to overwhelm reporters and studio anchors...

...it's fantastically-written and there's more here.

kiran nagarkar also wrote about the skewedness of the reportage that he sensed sitting in germany, where none of the international media seemed worried about anything other than white people in big hotels. nowhere did he find figures or details about CST and the poor or middle class who were being felled there like flies. well, the world is obsessed with white people, just as we seem to be with our rich, beautiful and famous.

is it just me?

2008-12-04T20:08:00.001-08:00

am i really the only one grossed out by the media frenzy over the terror attacks? i get the feeling that the old and the breathless - the barkha dutts and the arnav goswamis and all the other little idiot tiddlywinks - really are getting their collective knickers in a twist simply to justify their fat salaries finally. it's mind-bendingly sad and gross and tacky and just somehow so immature.
so bad, in fact, that the govt's finally seemed to notice and has asked for them to stop repeating footage of the attacks aimlessly (today's hindustan times, front page and page 6). i expect the media to go a bit off-centre, to look under the obvious, to somehow be a bit liberal, a bit thoughful. but they've turned out to be real jokers and vultures this time, literally using this whole incident to up their precious trp's.
gouri was asked by some pakistani left-leaning friends as to why the indian media seemed to toe the govt. line so obsessively; why did there seem no independent thinking almost? she felt like replying - and rightly so - that the govt. didn't seem to have as much of 'line' as the media, which seemed to be playing judge and jury in this rather sensitive case.
friends who went to the rally at the gateway said that the only sad thing was the amount of anti-pak feeling and sloganeering. it was overwhelming to see the collection of so many people without an obvious political focus (though the rss types were there too), but with a deep underlying sense of sorrow, anger and disappointment; but it was also scary to see how top-of-mind war was.
this is totally a product of how the tv channels have swung it for us. they've made pakistan and its establishment out to be so evil that if you're watching tv for a lot of time, like many people are, it's easy to get swallowed by their jingoistic tirades. there is total anarchy - here as well as there. how would fighting a war between states help? i really don't know what the way out is, but i do know for sure that if there is a popular push for war, the tv channels are to blame.
here's something small by my favourite author amitav ghosh on the subject.

he's coming, he's coming. oh darn. he's not...

2008-12-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

some days back, these obscene posters were put up all over chembur. huge hoardings for the bhoomipujan of the chembur-sandhurst rd monorail link. they bore pix of manmohan singh, sonia, gurudas kamat AND a big shiny unbelievable long, whizzy and phallic-looking monorail train. each poster had a different monorail train from the other, depending on the ingenuity of the dtp guy and which country his photostock-cd came from. one was yellow, another was red, a third was white and blue. all had 'chembur' written on the train. one was morphed on to an actual flyover above the market - and the flyover was labelled 'chembur railway station'. yeah, right. the gandhi maidan had been cleaned, grilled and painted, roads around it freshly paved (three in all), the footpath blessed with paver blocks that actually fit.

and now, all that is over. without even a whisker of our dear pm's beard landing at the domestic airport. nearly all the posters have come down. luckily the roads and footpaths haven't been dug up yet in a fit of civic pique. what saddens me is the overall ad-hoc-ism and expeditiousness of our approach to everything. i think this marks and mars each of our institutions, our responses and our processes.

the pm is coming, so quick, patch up roads on his route. don't do anything about the bad roads all over chembur in general (forget about the rest of mumbai); the broken paver blocks that people trip on; the homeless slum dwellers struggling in mandala; the noxious dumping ground in deonar and the colonies next door; a simple thing like the rusted, broken play equipment in diamond garden and other public parks - and so much more. i'm only talking about a few of the issues in our part of chembur because it strikes me as funny how even in this tiny microcosmic area, the pm's visit-that-wasn't did not bring anything more some pots of paint, and repairs to three roads.

this ad-hoc band-aid type approach of ours is everywhere. amit's mns friend was telling him about the numerous people he saw dying at cst when he happened to be there that fatal night - the cop, a friend of his, who told him to stay inside the chowky and stepped out only to be shot instantly; the street child who took a bullet to his brain; the overworked cop who wrote 600 panchnamas in one night and got them photocopied at his own cost (i believe cops have to do this, only to be reimbursed - sort of - when they retire. no wonder they are easily bribed); of the rusty jammed revolvers our cops use (and we all know about the hockey-goalkeeper-type bullet-proof shields they are given, don't we?). his stories are profoundly moving. and i wonder if he sees the irony in all this. just last month the mns was holding the city to ransom - beating up people, killing them. it was interesting to watch an interview with Mr Zende, the vt station announcer who saved many lives. his hindi-speaking UP colleague was with him that night, and while zende spoke, he switched off the lights in time and helped the continued broadcast of messages. NOW do parties which polarize people - the mns and the shiv-sena-bjp - see how stupid and petty they are? will the bjp ever see how myopic it was and is? how religion, ethnicity, language - nothing in the end is more valuable than or matters more than human life? and how easy it is - when you're having a good time kicking someone small - for a larger boot to find you and kick your head in?

i doubt that would have been top-of-mind when advani, munde and modi zipped to their various assignations in mumbai on what, the day after the attacks? they stood outside the oberoi and the chhabad house looking like idiots and daft wankers, causing near-riots. but votes are all, right? and what about so-pretty-it-hurts rahul gandhi who spent the whole of thursday - 8 hours of the actual hostage crisis day - at some party where among other things, cricket was played? wow.

another example of our immaturity is the rash of vaguely unsettling sms's doing the rounds - the anti-raj thackeray ones specifically. i hate the thackerays as much as the next rational person. but that message had this weird, sinister quality to it - it was annoyingly petty where it could have been a lot more profound. as if the mumbai cops (marathi or otherwise) who fought valiantly to reduce the damage - some of who died doing it - didn't count; that somehow being 'sons of the soil', they were simply cannon-fodder. i mean how small is that. why must we - in our attempts to be witty - sink to the level of idiots?

though i've totally rationed my tv-viewing, i watched a bit of times now last night, and the channel's coverage had me shaken. another instance of how quickly and easily we resort to wrong-doing. they seem to have 'exclusive' coverage of kasav the terrorist's confession and some more 'exclusive' cctv footage of the cst shooting. tell me, did all of that come for free? no bribery happened to oil that footage, those words out of there? now isn't corrupting officals for the sake of trp's expeditious and wrong? doesn't it ease the way for the next set of bribers to come in? the tone of their reportage as well - i think arnav goswami is a self-righteous little prig, but that fair, gaunt guy they have? he sounds a 100% bigot, and simply way he spoke could bring up the communal pitch. he went on and on and on about 'madrassas spewing hate' so much that i wanted to ask him if he'd heard of the rss.

the whole of our terror porn - starting with our dear star-struck cm - frightens me. when the nsg guys were requesting tv channels not to show their strategies on air, these same self-righteous announcers didn't care to respond. and they kept showing stuff - never forgetting to add those magic words 'exclusively brought to you by your channel, ...' - in this breathless, semi-orgasmic way. it all shows me that between our daft politicians and our trp-hungry channels, we haven't a hope.

the few things that do give me hope are peoples' reactions, the anger of the bereaved. Mrs Karkare's refusal of modi's tainted bucks, for one, and Sandeep Unnikrishnan's father yelling at the kerala cm (i mean, it doesn't get more humiliating in malayalam than poda patti). it's that pitch of post-bereavement rage, when your loss is so huge that even the smallest thing will drive you to anger beyond despair - the white-hot fury when you feel that with everything gone, you have nothing left to lose. i know because i felt it 8 and a half months back.

there's no hope for us, really. not unless someone funnels some wisdom into our heads in small trickles.

or does an obama on us.

(ps: after i posted this, i read paro's piece, and i think it says a lot that i felt as well but couldn't articulate... please to read. also look at the first post - her friend's comments on what she feels is wrong with the media. very taut and again, manages to focus my anger the way i couldn't!)

Holy Cow - Shooting with Paul Merton in Junagadh

2008-11-10T23:44:00.000-08:00

Last March I worked on the now-infamous British documentary series Paul Merton in India. The most talked-about, debated and hated/loved story in the show was Paul visiting Junagadh, a town in Saurashtra, Gujarat. Lots of Hindu groups and individuals in the UK found the story on Naga Sadhus at the Shivratri festival offensive and insulting to the Hindu faith. Read the comments here on the Telegraph site and here on the Hindu Voice site.
Lots of Desis in the UK, stuck in the typical NRI time-warp, felt any mention of a Shivling and penis in the same sentence was insulting to the Hindu faith. As one of the production coordinators on the shoot, I took the crew to Junagadh to meet the crazy Naga Sadhus.

I know about Junagadh because I was born there and grew up there. I had seen the Shivratri fair and the antics of the Naga Sadhus since childhood and saw nothing particularly odd or bizarre about them. These were a group of men who had discarded everything including clothes and if they could pull trucks with their dicks, it just meant that Hinduism was too big or too huge for us to comprehend and this was just one of its manifestations - however bizarre.
It was a revelation filming the Shivratri festival, the sadhus and the millions of devotees who came from villages all around Junagadh. The devotees' reverence and faith for this crazy lot of Sadhus was amazing - it was there for everyone to see. Often we'd find a poor farmer or a bank official in a Safari suit sitting amicably with a stark naked sadhu and sharing a chillum - knowing that his faith allowed him this minor digression and the sky would not open up if they enjoyed a couple of heady drags. There were strange sights all around, and that the religion and society had space within them for this extreme-ness was exciting in itself.

Oneof the Sadhus was dressed like Merlin - with a pointy hat, dark glasses and purple hair - rightout of Hogwarts School, and a female Sadhvi walked around wearing a pink hat and nothing else. One of the disciples of the Sadhus we were sitting with said very proudly, "Maharaj can perform 501 tricks with his ling (penis)!".

None of the villagers or even the very respectable middle-class Hindu Gujjus found any of this strange - nobody's faith was threatened and nobody raised an eyebrow. Well, nobody except the devout in their plush sitting rooms in Leicester and Southall.

Naga Sadhus and Akharas are extreme forms of the Hindu faith - they are strange, bizarre and outlandish - like many other things in India and we were just there filming it. India is a fascinating mix of cultures, religions and no film can do complete justice to its huge store of bizarre and strange stories. It might embarrass us, but it's all unmissably there.

An Indian from the UK I bumped into at a hotel recently told me that she thought the Paul Merton show made fun of India. Well Ma'am, slimy, cunning Westerners did not put all those nutty things there - they have been among us ages and will continue being here forever - or at least I hope so!

While we can live happily amongst the squalid and the bizarre, there is a strange coyness about showing any of it, especially among fatcat NRIs who have happily abandoned all of it to live in the sanitised West, and are suddenly very protective about the image of 'their' land and religion. Yes, the Tatas have bought Jaguar, and we are a booming economy, but that doesn't stop your average Naga sadhu from enjoying his occasional chillum. Bum Bhole!
- Amit (for a change!)

The rest is silence

2008-11-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure about this, but I suspect I'll never write a book because everything I want to say has been said already by two gentlemen: Berkeley Breathed in his Bloom County books, and Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury. Of the two, I enjoy Trudeau in his current form, and I LOVED Breathed in his '80s, '90s form. Of late, Breathed's comp-coloured extravaganzas somehow lack bite. I think a great comic artist-writer is a sort of oracle, spotting trends, and being able to see the pitfalls and blunders we are heading for. That was what I loved the early Breathed for. Now, only Trudeau sems to be doing it. Here he is on the elections - is he cool, or what??

PS: As i clicked publish post, news came that the O-man has won. Amazing and truly wonderful, but really given the royal republican mess made by GBW (who Trudeau symbolizes using a battered Roman-legionary-type helmet), was there any doubt? I mean, I was scared and had doubts that McCain would win - nothing against him specifically, but because it would mean an endorsement of everything gross that the republicans stand for. In true oracular style, Guru Trudeau at least had no doubts.

Cracked pots?

2008-10-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

N's school has a good rule. No chips, biscuits, cookies in the tiffin box, except on Friday, which is 'favourite food day'. To N, it's 'junk food day' and she loves planning what will go into her dabba. I have slimily convinced her that nuts, banana chips and nankhatais are junk food, which they are of course, but compared to the Bytes and the Kellogg's Chocos and Lays chips, almost perhaps of a lesser sort. Every once in a long while, she gets a few monstrously sweet treats like Chocos and Lays. So if she grows up into a snack-guzzling, cola-swigging teen, we know who to blame for having let her have a deprived childhood, right?

Packing the daily tiffin-box - how to make it fun and healthy and mess-free; how to fit it all into a small oval steel dabba; how to whip it up toot sweet - these are Big Issues that trouble me. I do my darndest, but this, I thought, was bordering on the surreal - Japanese style. The Bento box is, according to wiki, 'a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables as a side dish. Containers range from disposable mass produced to hand crafted lacquerware.'

I'm cracked alright, but not as touched, thank god, as the moms who go to these seemingly endless lengths. Fun to see but must be such a pressure to pack the frickin' thing and then take photo, cries of jaldi, jaldi, school bus chali jayegi ringing out (in Jaapani bhasha, of course) in the background. Nice, but I cannot see it happening in the Nair-Vachharajani household.

Meanwhile, I religiously - and shamelessly - go to the Bento Anarchy (hahahaha!) page every few days. Worry about the food colours they seem to use so merrily, and the plastic dabbas; and ogle at the impossibly clever cookie cutters they seem to have. Food porn for me.

Olive Riddley troubles

2008-09-09T21:10:00.000-07:00

One of the annoying things about working on something for children to read or to see is that it makes you frighteningly conscious about the future. We are working on a children’s book on India – researching, writing and illustrating it. While it pays so little it’s not funny, what we’ve gained in terms of knowledge and sheer awareness of this large and complex country is awesome. Researching for pictures and textual information means going through a set process: mild curiosity to begin with, and then as we read more and more, awe, shock, delight, wonder, and sometimes, anger and dismay.

Take the case of the highly endangered Olive Ridley turtles which come every winter to nest on the beaches of Gahirmatha, Devi and Rushikulya in Orissa (illustration by Amit for the book). Following an unerring instinct, they come from faraway Sri Lanka and even Australia. They come all along the coast – to Orissa, parts of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Khambat and Kerala.

Though numerous eggs are laid every winter by the Olive Ridleys, only one in a thousand hatchlings survives. Trawler nets, pollution and poaching kill many of the turtles, the eggs and the hatchlings. Once hatched, the baby turtles rush to the sea using stars, the sea’s luminescence and moonlight to help them navigate. Reaching the sea is absolutely crucial, and thanks to road lights, they often blunder in the wrong direction. Activists and villagers manage to turn them the right way sometimes.

To add to the mind-boggling dangers they face, a new menace has been approved by the state govt. – the Dhamra port at Gahirmatha beach, 15 kms from the nesting ground of these small sea turtles), gravely endangering an already fragile population. Though owned by the state, it is to be built by the Tatas, who frankly, should know better by now, I think. Apart from the many different kinds of ecological damage the Dhamra port will do, it will have artificial lights which will mislead the baby turtles much more than mere road lights. The port will also seriously harm the livelihood of fishing communities there. For specifics on all the kinds of ecological and human damage, read this.

While creating something for children to read, for the future to see, one realizes – with great shame – what it is that we are doing to the world. How foolishly we are squandering its few remaining treasures, instead of proudly protecting them. I think the world over, a place like this would be preserved, as a sign of human restraint and wisdom. It shames us to sense that only in India, perhaps, would we be ignorant and greedy enough to willfully destroy something so timeless and wonderful.

The Tatas – for all their bad record at Singur – are signatories to the U.N.’s Global Compact for Corporate Responsibility. Tata Steel, for one, is pledged to something called the Precautionary Principle, which, according to Wikipedia, is ‘a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. But in some legal systems, as the European Union Law, the precautionary principle is also a general principle of law. This means that it is compulsory. The principle aims to provide guidance for protecting public health and the environment in the face of uncertain risks, stating that the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason to postpone measures where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm to public health or the environment.’

So while the 'developed' world sees protecting the environment and rights of the poor as a sign of progress, only in India, peculiarly, do we see both of the above as signs of weakness and stagnation.

If this disturbs you as much as it did us, go here and add your voice to those of activists and environmentalists from the world over. It may not seem like much, but there's no point not trying, no?

Technosqueak meets her nemesis

2008-07-21T20:39:00.000-07:00

Though I use comps all the time, I am a certified, card-carrying techno-duh, a techno-phobe, a techno-squeaky-scaredy-cat. A friend once observed that I will learn just as much tech as I need to get by, no more. Over the years, I've been both proud and ashamed of this. But always, always I've been hopeful of one thing - that my daughter will be like me: wiling to learn, able to, but not, like, champing at the bit to get at a comp, dreaming of macs, willing to spend hours figuring out comps, etc., like her dad. I'm terrified of exposing kids to tech too early, because we all know, don't we, where that goes? Addiction to gaming, refusing to write on paper, whatnot. I've seen kids as young three years figuring out games on cel phones (and playing them obsessively). It freaks me out.
Amit was saying something the other day about the level of tech knowledge of the youngest members of society being indicative of the tech awareness of that society. I got an insight into that recently. To get to our house you have to climb interminable stairs. It fatigues everyone, esp n with her small legs, and no one ever carries her up. As she climbs the stairs holding the shiny metal handrail, she says with a smile: See, I'm loading, amma, slowly, slowly. While going down to school every morning, she says, See, I'm downloading.
Who's to blame for this? Me of course. Trying to distract her by showing her the Dora website on the laptop, and when she says, Where's Dora?, telling her to look at the bar sliding up slowly, slowly because it's loading.
Bah.

Through a fishbowl, darkly

2008-07-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

What do you do with an empty fishbowl? What, for that matter, do you do with a hole in your life that measures about 6 feet? Nothing in the case of the latter except avoid looking at old photos like they were a portal into a spiral of tears, guilt, more tears and depression.
For the former, you make a plan to grow something else in it. A terrarium maybe, which could be assembled at the local nursery. We had gifted Siya one - where the nursery owner promised to make it in front of her (I am ever the educative auntie)- and being slightly fey, she handed them a care sheet that suggested they find a name for their terrarium - like say Terrarium Bob. And where are we, I asked? In New Texas?
When ours came home, we kept joking and calling it Bob, till n declared that no, not Bob, but Tinkle. Terrarium Tinkle. I love the sight of a terrarium, and had many ambitions to make one on my own in a large, broad bottle used to transport acid; make it the old-fashioned way, with self-crafted tools (basically, spoons, forks tied to a strongish stick); putting in layer after layer of mud / compost with care, and planting low-growing plants in it. But apart from lack of enthusiasm, I see myself as a bit of a Typhoid Mary just now - one who shouldn't be allowed near delicate things that might need nurturing.
So here's our terrarium, nothing as handsome as my acid-bottle-dream, but still, a good thing to do with an empty fishbowl, no?

The Girl with the Camera...

2008-07-05T01:58:00.000-07:00

…shoots a favourite subject: Sangita Maushi, our sweet, diligent cook. They really have a great rapport, and after the first pic she clicked of us, n wanted the second to be of Sangita, since, I think, the grandma wasn’t around. What with one thing and another, Marathi is n’s second language, English being her first (please don’t even ask about Malayalam and Gujarati – we had wanted her to speak fluently in those two first – or at least Malayalam for now – but we were told to put a sock in it till she was four by People Who Know).

Since mom and me speak Marathi ranging from extremely well (mom) to passably (me), we’re most thrilled. N has learned many Marathi songs from mom and another maid, Kalpana. Sangita, apart from making the world’s thinnest chapattis and its dullest dals, is a great purveyor of Marathi songs. I’ve forgotten many, but, deviyon aur sajjano, paish karte hai, what I remember of the Marathi hums which n hums (all errors in transcription, translation and lyrics are mine):

They range from the sweet –

Ye, ye ga sari, majhe matke bhari,

Sar aali dhaavoon,

Matke gele vaahoon!

Come, come, waves, fill my pots,

The wave came rushing,

And my pots went off!

To the cute –

Naach ga guma, Kashi mee naachu?

Ya gaavcha, tyaa gaavcha,

Aala nahi maali, ani mala nahi veni.

Naach ga…

Aala nahi shimpi, ani mala nahi choli.

(from Kalpana)

Dance little girl! How will I dance?

This village’s, that village’s

Gardener hasn’t come, and I don’t have a flower-garland.

Dance little girl! How will I dance?

This village’s, that village’s

Tailor hasn’t come, and I don’t have a blouse.

To the cloying –

Pusa dole rumaalane,

Radathe kashaala,

Shaleth jani N, chukena kunala

Kelisarkhi wadavili, jai sarkhi phulavili,

Aai bole n majhi, shalela geli.

Wipe your tears with your kerchief,

Why do you weep?

N goes to school, never harms a soul,

She’s grown like a banana plant,

Blossomed like a jai flower,

Mom says my N, she’s gone to school.

To the obscene –

Aalyacha mala madhe kon ga ubhi?

Vaangi todathe mee, raavaji, raa-va-ji,

Haath naka laavu, bagheen konitari!

Who’s there in the vegetable garden?

It’s just me, sir, just plucking a few brinjals.

Please don’t touch me, someone will see!

(A highly feudal song, sung in the original with an erotic, false sort of coyness… Positively EWWW when your 3.5 yr old sings it.)

To the bawdy –

Ye, ye ga pahune, Sakkuche mehune,

Sakku la baghoon hastoy ga,

Kaay tari ghotala distoy ga!

(This is an Omana-ammu rendition of the Dada Kondke classic.)

Come, come dear guest,

He’s Sakku’s brother-in-law,

Look how he’s smiling at Sakku,

It looks like something’s up!

And the hilarious:

Ambyachi ddhalki var baslaay mor,

Navryacha bapoos kaute-chor!

Ambyacha dhalki halveelli,

Navryana navrili palvili.

There’s a peacock on a mango-branch,

The groom’s dad is an egg-thief!

The mango-branch was given a shake,

And the groom ran off with the bride!

There’s also the odd ethnographical one –

Dokevari paati maura chi,

Kaay kolin chaalli bajari.

Yevda vata laavlay mota,

Aavar ye ga maushi, aavar ye.

On my head is a basket of fish,

I’m a Kolin setting off to the market,

Look at this large array, Auntie,

Come, come and finish it off!

The maniacally religious –

Hey Bhole Shankara,

Aavad tula belachi, aavad tula belachi,

Belacha paanaachi!

Oh Bhole Shankara,

You love the bela flower, you love the bela flower,

And even the bela’s leaves!

And this one which makes me cry – for obvious reasons – even as I type and translate it -

Sonya cha thati, ugalleli jyothi,

Ovalhathe bhau raja, yevda bahinichi vedi maya,

Gaadi ghunghurati, majhya maherachi,

Ovalhathe bhau raja, yevda bahinichi vedi maya,

A plate of gold, and a circling lamp,

I’m doing an arati for my prince of a brother, for that’s how much I’m devoted to him.

The tinkling bells of the cart from my mother’s village,

I’m doing an arati for my prince of a brother, for that’s how much I’m devoted to him.

(I’ve kept the translation bare on purpose – didn’t want to rhyme and poeticize unnecessarily – because I wanted to keep the Marathi meaning untouched.)

Revenge of the Nerds - Part 2

2008-06-05T02:30:00.000-07:00

One of the best books I've read in the longest time is Robin David's City of Fear. If the crappy books I got sent to review were any indication, I was sure that City... would be very well received indeed. The book was released and got like maybe 3 reviews in print and some more online. And that was it. No buzz, nothing. Apparently, the publishers were a bit nervous that Modi would get mad, really mad, and decided to keep things a bit low key.

In the nicest bit of news I've heard so far this year (and 2008 has been terrible, miserable, horrible for me and my family), The Indian Express informed us that City of Fear has been nominated for the Crossword Book Awards in the non-fiction category, with, hold your collective breaths, the likes of Ramchandra Guha and William Dalrymple. So whether the book finally manages to win or not, I think Robin's courage and the conviction and strength of his writing have already won. Proving finally that in some quarters at least, it's what you know and how you write that count, and not the buzz and weird publicity that you manage to generate...

Of cousins, kids and the big Bang book

2008-05-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

My cousin Rekha's visits from Canada always, always means one thing - the most delightful, surprising picture books. And not in ones and twos, mind you, but in bags - plastic bags, glossy, shiny, truly phoren ones that are strong and can bear the 5-odd kilos of picture books she stuffs them with. There are always three or four such bags, chosen and filled with great care by her, and while n studies the chocolates and the art stuff or the toys, Amit and I go into a huddle over the books. Juggling two jobs and a family, she still manages to scour her city for the nicest old (some from the '50s, '60s and '70s too) and new picture books. She always manages to strike a balance between the parents' greed and the child's needs - so they are the sweeter books which will appeal to n, and the darker, older, more esoteric ones that she feels Amit will like, or I will.

One of the books she got us this time was this beautifully painted book called The Grey lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang. I took one look at it and clearly classified it as one of the darker books - certainly not for the resident rabbit. N's favourites just now - to an obsessive degree - are The Berenstein Bears who are sweet enough, and intelligent too, but after a while, their American-style clean living just gets to you. Unlike before, she refuses to experiment with genres. Normal, I guess. So I didn't even bother trying to show it to her and put it away, till, one meal-time, in a defiant sort of mood, I took it out and showed it to her.

The book was a surprise to both of us. For one, it didn't have words - any words. Then, one of the two main characters was an old, mysteriously-named 'Grey Lady', who appeared in tones of a dull, light brown. The other was a thin, sinister-looking fellow - all gangly-limbed and a startling shade of blue. He wore a bright yellow-and-red shawl and a purple hat, and slunk around the book, sometimes looking casual, sometimes evil, sometimes clever, sometimes determined, relentless, and finally, just hysterically happy.

I thought n would be scared of the images, of the snatcher's furtiveness; of the sliver of shiny danger that runs through the book. But she was intrigued by the story, rivetted by the old woman's courage and the snatcher's determination. And, most of all, by the artist's clever, bright pictures and the swift-though-wordless pace at which things move.

There is a wonderful urgency to the story. It starts sweetly enough. An old lady goes to a shop to buy strawberries. On her way out, the Snatcher sees her. He follows her, making many a dive and grab for the basket of berries. Magically - with a lot artist ex machina - she manages to stay safe, often missing his gnarly blue-fingered, red-tipped hands by a hair's breadth. She dashes into buses, hides in a swamp, climbs a tree, swings from a vine, and then, just as the toothily grinning Snatcher almost reaches her (also by vine), she disappears into a light-brown-coloured page, leaving the Snatcher puzzled and a bit defeated. Till you turn over and see that he has spotted the most delightfully detailed mulberry bush, and eating a few berries, looks blissful, content. So happy, that his hair stands up on end in a stunning orange-coloured afro. The Grey Lady is home safe, and her family - including the pets and sundry babies - are all delightedly biting into the berries.

What I thought would freak n out was the complexity of the detail and the slightly scary tone of the illustrations - much like in Tuesday. As with Tuesday, she liked it unexpectedly, she didn't get scared of it, and every time we open it, there's a new detail to be seen. Like there is an exotically dressed lady who rolls into frame on a red skateboard, holding a pail of eels. As the old lady dashes into a bus that is in the extreme right edge of the spread, the Snatcher bangs into the eel woman. Something that is only suggested by the eels flying all over the place on the next page. The Grey Lady disembarks from the bus at her stop and you see that the Snatcher is waiting for her there. How did he get there so fast? You realize only on the fifth reading that the Snatcher has snatched the eel lady's red skateboard. Then, after many, many readings you spot something magical and strange: the tiny mushrooms that sprout in the Snatcher's footsteps.

Also, somehow, Bang's narrative on each page is multi-dimensional. So in this pic, for instance, you have the Snatcher peering out and spotting the Grey Lady, and him following her, all casual-like. The visual is separated by that door there, and I thought it would be confusing for n that there are two parts of a narrative phrase here, and not two sets of different characters. (Click on it for a better view - the scan is bad.)

But intuitively, she got it. That's not surprising; kids these days are bright. My point is something else. I googled Molly Bang and found this. Read it because it tells you about the sheer cussedness of people, how they refuse to consider that kids can like things that are slightly off-centre too. When it comes to children and what they should read or watch on tv, everyone is an expert. And everyone usually gets it wrong as well (of course, this is more apparent on tv than in the world of books).

Getting published can be tough, uphill work. Often creativity seems like only a tenth of the process. The bigger, tougher part is sheer dogged determination you need to - like Bang - keep on submitting, re-working, re-thinking and then submitting again.

Because I can't bear to write...

2008-05-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

...here's another photo post. N and her father discovered a train of ants in our jade plant. So this delicious-looking soap solution was made (using the tandurusti ki raksha karne wala Lifebuoy) to pour on the plants. Ironically, the jade's leaves were ruthlessly plucked by n and shucked into the solution, making it a lovely Zen-like discovery of a morning for me. When you're feeling as low as I am, even small things give pause for thought.

N, meanwhile, has been feeling triumphantly evil over her 'cruelty' and has cast herself in the role of a witch. She keeps humming to herself as she sprays the plants: 'Sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle / I'm here to pour Lifebuoy water on you...' Struck by the lurid strawberriness of the potion, she rushed and got a sticker of a strawberry and stuck it on the outside of the plastic container so that, she said excitedly, 'the ants will see it and think it's a tasty strawberry milkshake, and then they'll drink it!' I could almost hear the mean 'muwahahaha' laugh in her voice.

In Manori...

2008-05-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

...Man meets hammock,

Child meets bullock cart.

Crab colonies on the beach - less fragile, it strikes me, than human life.

N's first drawing ever - inspired by the softness of the sand, and framed by a fatherly toe. In case you're wondering, it's a flower with a leaf. Wonder if any of the aforementioned colonies were sacrificed while creating this.

Tag! I'm it.

2008-02-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

I've had a dull sort of day. Finished off two bits of work yesterday, and thought I'd give myself a rest. Spent the day feeling d-u-l-l. Read other people's blogs and loved the way the write, and felt like I shouldn't be writing at all, since I can be neither brief nor clever. Then found this and it cheered me up mariginally - in the way pop quizzes in magazines used to when I was younger. So here goes.

A -Available?
In my dreams.

B-Best friend:
Umm. Am a Hard Kaur these days, and not thinking 'bast frands' at all.

C-Cake or Pie?
Actually, paal payasam, pressure-cooked till it's light pink.

D-Drink of choice:
Can't believe I'm saying this: Peach Iced Tea

E-Essential thing used everyday:
Chashma and cushion!

F-Favourite colour:
Turquoise maybe, or red, or sea-green.

G-Gummi bears or worms:
Worms, any day. I hate GBs.

H-Hometown:
Chembur

I-Indulgence:
Comics - like Bloom County, Doonesbury, Asterix and Tintin

J-January or February:
January. It has so many possibilities.

K-Kids and names:
One. N.

L-Life:
Short, painful, brutish. But with some lovely moments, of course.

M-Marriage date:
Dec 8

N-Number of siblings:
One

O-Oranges or apples:
Oranges

P-Phobias:
LIZARDS!!

Q-Quote:
Mars needs Moms!

R-Reason to smile:
N. She makes me grin, giggle, groan.

S-Season:
Monsoons

T-Tag three people:
Can't. Practically all the other bloggers I know have had this done to them. Will tag just one, and hope Paro doesn't mind it.

U-Unknown fact about me:
Better let it stay that way, no?

V-Vegetable you do not like:
Paapdi

W-Worst habit:
Talking on the phone. Incessantly. Being able to not work even when there is a lot to do.

X-x-rays you have had:
Many.

Y-Your favorite food:
Oh god, where do I start. I LUHVE food. Dahi batata puris and chicken biryani are the stuff I dream about.

Z-Zodiac:
Scorpio

The Gourami also rises

2008-02-21T11:08:00.000-08:00

I’ve always, always longed for a fish tank. Or maybe just one bowl, round, perfect, like a bubble with a golden blob of a fish bobbing in it. Growing up there was no question of it, of course, people at home wouldn’t hear of it. Then, with Amit, there were these prolonged discussions when he’d say, “I’ve had a fish tank, and the fish keep dying, and you’ll feel sad…” Hahaha, I’d laugh out loud, my head thrown back evilly, and say that I see fish only as food, not as friends at all, so no one’s going to catch me feeling really sad about a dead fish. Which, for some reason, instead of reassuring him, only made him blanch.

Time passed and n happened, and we got given a betta fish in a tiny fishbowl by Priya. She had researched the fish carefully: it was a native of the paddy fields of Laos, and was a loner (not for nothing was it a.k.a the Cambodian Fighter), and breathed air from the surface. So a.) it liked small spaces, and b.) didn’t need an oxygen pump. Most importantly, it didn’t like or need company.

Two days after the betta – who n named variously: ‘black-and-white’, ‘spotty’ and ‘swimmy’ – came home, we googled it and found that you should change the water every two or three days to prevent toxicity. With great care and dexterity we transferred it from small bowl to large bowl via a tea cup and an old sieve and it never once popped out and writhed as we were told fish do when you change the water. Yes, well, that done (we nearly sprained out pecs patting ourselves on our backs), we set out for some photo session at n’s school.

Back home an hour later, I looked at the fish, thought there was something odd about it, peered closer and saw that it was belly-up. Of course. The net doesn’t warn you about the chlorine in Mumbai’s water and how you need to pour in a de-chlorinating fluid before you blithely change the fish’s immediate environment.

Calmly I called Amit, who was first sad, then bitter, then devastated – when he heard of the chlorine thingy. That evening he flushed it away mournfully, as I patted his back. For days he lectured us about the pitfalls of having a fish at home; and how he wasn’t worried about himself, but see how it was upsetting ‘everyone’. N registered it in passing, but, typically of someone her age, I think, discussed it only days later when I was asked, ‘Why Swimmy died, amma?’ Before I could think of a suitably deep and yet simple answer, she said, ‘Now Swimmy dead no, so you must get me a pet rabbit.’

Now the grandma has taken it on herself to get a new fish and make it survive, or else. So today – despite parental disapproval – a Golden Gourami has come home. With blue pebbles for company and a packet of dried Red-Sea worms, and a bottle of de-chlorinating fluid. He / she is from the Laotian paddy fields (where there must be no fish left at all), a cousin of our old friend the betta. We are still not sure of the aggression levels (some sites say Gouramis love company; others say they just love to eat company), so the poor sod just has us and the pebbles to look at.

He / she is a stunner, though. Gold and with black stripes and spots, and with a lovely pair of long, thin whiskers… Fingers crossed that this one doesn’t end down the loo as well!

Kapkapi - The Shivers

2008-02-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

I hate the cold. I’m from the coast originally and have lived in Bombay all my life, and I’ve realized now, through this oddly cold winter, that I like my weather muggy, hot and squelchy. I love the normal Bombay winter because it is merely a state of non-heat; one where the mercury drops to say, 27, and we’re all like, ooh, there’s a nip in the air, do you feel it? Lovely, no? Delhiites and other Northerners look at you, one eyebrow raised, and say, call this a winter? You should see the ball-breakers we have back home.

No thank you, I say, keep your winter snobbery. It’s warm weather for me (regardless of how much I crib in summer). It’s so cold this year that - unusually for this city - you don’t need to turn on the fan ever. And if you do, it’s only to keep away the mosquitoes. It's so cold that you got out in the evening for a walk, the wind blows, and leaves a welter of angry goose pimples on your skin. Forget nippy, it’s like the air has grown a million sharp little teeth with which it bites into you. I’ve seen people shivering and huddling around makeshift fires all over Chembur, fergodssake, and I cannot tell you how unlikely a sight that is.

I do not like the strange sense of stasis that this cold brings: the reluctance to put my feet on the chilly floor, the numbing cold of the water that flows out of taps, the fact that we don’t have the woollies or the mindset needed to take this weather on the chin. I don’t like it being so dry that my skin stretches after a bath simply because it’s too darn cold to cream up before you cover up. I hate the thought that if we find it hard to cope living in our warm flats, how horrendous it must be for street people, and even for the average, very poor Bombay-ite who doesn’t have the money to buy warm clothes.

I wouldn’t want to agree with any of the Thackerays on anything, but when young Raj Thackeray calls Vilasrao Deshmukh Khallas-rao (khallas means the end, destruction), I find myself pausing to think. Apart from selling off all available open spaces to the builder’s lobby, the man has other fine points. One of them is a blind-spot towards the very poor – evident in his cruel, totalitarian slum-demolition drives. You’d think any right-thinking government would start some donation drives of warm things, or maybe give away blankets to the poor. Some way to help people who have always lived in a balmy city to deal with the cold, right? Nothing short of a cold wave and people dying would wake this one up.

The bitter cold puzzles n too. She asked me, “Why this winter not going away, amma?” Why, indeed. It reminded me of my friend Gouri Patwardhan’s film on seasons. It had a small animated traditional story – an Eskimo myth about the rotation of seasons – called Kapkapi. One year, Old Man Winter refuses to leave the earth. People shiver and huddle together, because the trees and plants have shrivelled up and died, and they have run out of food and firewood. There’s frost and ice everywhere.

Finally they pray to the Sun and he comes down. “Go away!” he says to Old Man Winter, which just makes the short, bearded, dark-eyed fellow angrier, more determined to stay. Grim, sullen, he waves a fat palm at the sun dismissively. The sun blows at him, a warm, yellow-orange breath that makes him shrink till he finally sits on a white owl and flies off.

I love this little sequence because Gouri’s rounded figures and lovely colours are so delightful. In the climax, the ice on a pond cracks, the water gleams through and then morphs into colourful birds. It’s breath-taking. Done in pre-comp days, the entirely cel animation has a lovely, uncluttered feel to it. The vo, because it was recorded back in them days, is dire. But watch it a couple of times, and you begin to enjoy the animation and forget the sepulchral narration. Weather like this really makes me think of those shivering people and how they must have longed for the balmy touch of spring. Wish I could find an image and put it here, but hard luck on that one. Might rig up something in the future though, so watch this space.

Any winter food favourites? Mine is the lovely sweet potato snack outside CP in Delhi… And of course Sindhi Camp’s artery-hardening fried pakwans.

Brown-paper packages...

2008-01-17T21:33:00.001-08:00

I once raised a storm when I was 8. I was a bit of a dimbulb, loser type of kid, and had banded up with three nice, equally low-wattage girls in class. One was called Lorraine, the other was a tam-brahm called Savitha, and I am sure there was a third, only I can't right now recall her name or face. Our school had a wonderful demographic - there were the few very rich, and then there was everyone else. Both Lorraine and Savitha came from homes that were slightly disadvantaged and frugally middle-class respectively. At school, we only gave out sweets for birthdays, and with my ‘group’ there were no birthday parties or sweets or anything, till one day I was told at home that it was my birthday next week.

No one at home was really saying anything about any party, and I had had one the previous year, so in my slightly duh way, I decided to take matters into my own hands and invite S and L over, and maybe, well, shoot the breeze a bit? Eat some cake, perhaps? You know, just hang out some? Thursdays were our weekly off, and I asked them to come over, at, say, six pm? Comes Thursday morn, and just as mom was setting out to office, I remembered the party. I mentioned it to her, casual like, and the house imploded around me. My mom was / is one of the chilled-out-est people on earth, but even she completely freaked. Cousins were sent out to get cake and who knows what else, while I just sat back, frankly a bit dazed by the yelling and the scurrying. That evening when all of my three guests – S, L and S’s brother came – it was a bit of an anti-climax. I think the family were expecting droves and were a bit startled to see the rag-tag company which walked in. After that, the memory grows duller – I remember everyone looking a bit embarrassed, and that’s it. My memory spikes again at one point – S had got me a tiny paperback of Birbal the Wise. It was from a popular, cheap imprint of them days, but I can’t remember the publisher’s name. I studied it for days and weeks later, turning it around and marveling at its small, rectangular perfection. It was the only gift from a fairly disastrous birthday party (I still didn’t know what I had done so bad), and I was soooo delighted, so grateful.

Why I remembered this is because N walked in from school today loaded – as usual – with a bag of 'return gifts'. For some reason, in her school, every child hands out these bags full of amazingly crappy, expensive, prodigiously over-packaged stuff. Today, for example, she came in with a toy gun, a mask, a monginis three-cake set called 'stripe tease', two toffees – all tossed into a plastic bag. Costing – at the very least – 40/- per head, and there are 52 kids in class. Do the math. And this is one of the smaller return gift packs. There are days when she gets bigger things, and more of them – cups, sun visors with dark-glasses built in, imitation patent leather back-packs, tetra packs of drinks, lays, perks, and more strange Chinese chocolates. And they are all, without fail, looked at for two minutes and then forgotten.

There’s very little thrill left in gift-receiving or giving any more, because it’s all a matter of going to Crawford Mkt and picking up the cheapest lot of Chinese stuff, bunging it all into a plastic bag from the next shop, and handing it out in class. We were traumatized by the loot bags that came in initially – they were all so expensive, so environmentally unsound and so gross somehow (I mean, those chocolates and weirdly coloured candies? They are so strange-tasting, so acidic somehow, that I’d fear for the health of any kid who ate them. And let's not even go to the Lays and the tetra pack drinks.) One child even had an event-managed bash in school which had a ventriloquist, a magician and a massive loot bag. How great was it? When we went in to pick her up, n was among the 40-odd kids sobbing and shrieking in hysterical fear. The ventriloquist’s jokes were loud – as in decibel-levels – and went right above the kids’ heads. The magician was the scariest I’ve ever seen.

When we went in to hand out toffees and a couple of books at n’s birthday the next week, one child heard the words ‘happy birthday’ and burst out sobbing. Looking back, I feel we really didn’t have to, but just then, we were anxious – would n have registered everyone else’s celebrations and would she feel bad? So we did something small and kept it plastic-and-crap free – I hope!

Where I’m going with all this is really nowhere great. Just felt a bit chagrined by the way n casts aside each loot bag after the initial excitement; at how the mere fact of receiving isn't a novel experience any more. I remembered how I gazed at that book for months later. And something else just struck me. That impromptu birthday bash had my cousin’s new fiancé who was visiting in the middle of all the confusion shocked. When he was growing up, there were shortages everywhere, and parents expected older kids to stand in ration-shop queues and lug back bags of rice and dal. Understandably, my cool cheek must have startled – and who knows – saddened him. But he used to grin and predict in a mock-dire voice that my next party would be my own wedding bash which I’d organize and plan myself.

Each generation has something to be distressed and shocked about in the next, I guess…

Did you bandh the batti?

2007-12-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

We did. For a whole hour. It was great fun because n loves power outs - since, thank god, they happen relatively rarely, and because the candles come out. So we put out the lights, burnt the candles, and turned off the tv, laptop, etc. We chatted like in the old days, mom and me, before comps and tvs happened.
I realized that I could bear the lights being out, and the fans being off, the phone being off, but what I couldn't take, finally, was the laptop being off. We've got used to such 24/7 connectivity, with a constant state of activity, that I really, truly felt like a drug addict on cold turkey. My fingers literally itched and I kept wanting to switch on, to just surf a bit, a teensy bit, I'm mean who'd know... But I'm proud to report, I didn't!
Anyway, the Batti bandh campaign - though well-meaning - seems a bit overoptimisitx, if you ask me. One hour of power-saving will save the planet, reduce global warming, save the beaches, etc. etc. I don't think so. It might have conscientized people - which it sadly didn't in any large, mass sort of way. It held the promise of becoming one of those post-Rang-de-Basanti campaigns (like the anti-reservation stir) where everyone hopped on largely because it seemed like such a cool thing to do. Everyone - and here I count myself in too - fwd'd madly and hopefully - but finally nothing much happened. I wonder why.
I was a bit sceptical - I mean what does one hour of switching off do? Actions towards saving the environment have to be more comprehensive, holistic and regular. So I loved what Sampath, the books editor at DNA wrote when I fwd'd him the mail (he's put it so well, that I simply have to quote him):

I am sorry but this one-hour thing- even if it is totally voluntary - seems to me only a smoke-screen that hides the real issues - our unfettered industrialisation, obsession with 9 per cent growth, investment in stock market (how can your stocks grow without the economy growing? and how can your economy grow without more of global warming caused by more industrialisation?), our refusal to respect or even tolerate subsistence economies wherever they are - our exporting of alternative ways of living and thinking (the tribals, for example) into the past as outdated.

then there is our patronising attitude towards all that is not 'cool' - and 'cool' is really a marketing invention that is tied up with global warming - ironic as it seems - right from tata safari dicor to rock concert in a flood-lit stadium, this sounds just like a silly rant here - but if i get some time off from not heating up the globe - i can elaborate on it. this is just a response - on the spur of the moment. nothing personal.

So there you are. Angrily, but succinctly put, I thought. I fully agreed with him, especially the bit about people only attaching themselves to 'cool' issues.
Only this: forget about global warming (towards which NOTHING can be done bec of all the problems mentioned), but if people can just conserve a little power, and hopefully it will be mapped by the BSES, then I think that it might be at least a few steps towards - well, power conservation - and nothing more!

Baby on beach with crabs

2007-12-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

Finally took a chhutti - a small one - to Goa. And came back riddled with mixed emotions as usual. I know abject poverty is terrible, but I can't help wondering whether tourism is the answer. There is something about a subsistence economy that is so ecologically sound and fundamentally dignified, that almost everything else - and tourism for sure - pales in comparison. I know this is an extremely simplistic way of looking at the situation, but honestly, when you see the way resorts and gated townships are gobbling up land in Goa, you can't help but feel a bit reactionary.

We usually stay in North Goa, where pretty much everything has been converted into a resort already. So you get an after-the-fact sort of feeling - like you've reached the place after the deed was done, and the body was packed up and put away. Everything looks a bit jaded, with an air of forced, but fairly robust cheer. North Goa makes you forget that Goa has an ecology of its own - both cultural and geographic. You just feel like you're in a city with a magnificent view.

Which is why the first time we were in Goa, when we took a day trip to the South, we loved it. The sand was white, the air was fresh (none of that nasty smell of the dieselly power-boats), there weren't too many resorts, and there was a sense of Goa with complete, unbridled green, and squat, healthy little villages. The sole GTDC resort stood stolidly on the beach.

We went back this time, after three years, and things had changed. The power boaters were there, stinking up the air and oiling the water, and offering you 'dolphin rides'. There were tons of small, ugly resorts. Suddenly, it was Calangute again, without the milling crowds - for now.

And there was a new vulnerability around as well, a certain fragile air - because small fishing villages were clinging on to the fringes of the land not bought over by the resorts as yet. We saw this in many places: great Uglinesses of concrete nestled in clumps of green. There's nothing even remotely after-the-fact-ish here. It feels as if you're standing by and watching a murder; sighing even as they gut the body while it's still alive.

The village near our resort seemed sturdy, though. The houses were spacious and prettily painted, and pigs, roosters and kids frolicked around. (Early in the morning, the cock crowed - I'm sorry, but this thrilled me beyond belief!) The five or six large houses which made up the part of the village that we could see were literally squeezed between resorts, the Railways guest house and the Indian Oil one. It made you wonder how long the villagers would be able to hold out, and once they sold, where they'd go, what they'd do, and how compromised their lifestyle already was.

There were large smelly dumps on street corners and en route to the beach. When we suggested that the nearby hotels could get together and clear them regularly, we were told "we do that, but the 'locals' keep dirtying it." Aside from being monumental cheek, it seemed untrue simply because most of the garbage was made up of mineral water bottles and plastic bags. Which seem more touristy in nature, and obviously tourists come to resorts, don't they?

When I hear people talk about Travel (yes, important enough in our mags and papers to merit a capital letter) without reference to the human and geographical ecology of a place, I feel a bit surreal, like I've been transported to a Victorian text. I wonder for instance how the people of beach-side villages in Goa - who once must have been able to see the sea from their houses - feel about the sea view being a premium commodity now, accessible only to the privileged few.

I suspect it's just a matter of time before the rest of the village left near our resort sells up. Their resilience in the face of many offers makes them seem more fragile somehow... Our driver, for instance, spoke about how foreigners and other outsiders were buying up so much land that prices were escalating beyond belief. 'Goans, we were happy with small house and paddy field...' He seemed to imply that Goans almost sat back and watched the land being lapped up by others...

This was one level of feeling of course. Confusing me at the other was the sheer joy of being in a place where each sunset is a work of art. When people say 'painterly sunsets' they must mean those lurid shows put up by the beach and the sun and the sand at Colva. Seriously, it has to be seen to be believed - I mean, imagine a blue-grey sky lined with streaks of fluorescent pink! N enjoyed the sand with an almost devout fanaticism. She loved standing in the water as it pulled her - 'it's making me travel!' she'd shout. We'd be with her on the beach and keep telling her to watch the sunset and the huge, dome-like, pink-flecked sky, and she'd look up for a bit and then start her elemental sand-worship again. She found transparent, large-eyed crabs scuttling around and watched them in awe. It was beautiful, sad and then, beautiful again...

It made me feel that by bringing n up in a city we were robbing her of so much. Like my mom keeps talking about her childhood in her 'native place', and I think n wants to match up too. The only place she can think of with similar 'natural' attributes is goa. So the other day she tells my mom, "Goa is my netti place, and we have kolla-korzhies (water birds) there too." Try correcting her that a. it's native and not netti and b. it's not her 'native place'; and you are met with stern rebuttal!

Sigh, the eternal confusions of the liberal mind. Just aware enough to not be able to lose oneself and yenjaay, and too cowardly to actually do something about anything.

Came the dawn

2007-11-20T22:00:00.001-08:00

So my 36^th came and went quietly. Normally I feel this small giggle in my stomach around a month before the actual date, and it swells and grows into a giant laugh of excitement by the time that the day actually dawns. There is such an air of self-generated, fairly hysterical joy, that a good time is had – No Matter What. (Like Gouri says, since birthdays seem to be the only things our generation celebrates, we might as well do so religiously.) Every year on the morning after my birthday I resolve to grow up next year, to not make such a song and dance about it, to not do so much natak, and have a quiet sedate time. An adult birthday in other words.

This time, I had my wish. Most of my friends were out of town and Amit dragged himself in every night for the month before – looking exhausted and bleary-eyed. Not really a good time to drop generous hints about what I’d like. Plus there was this air of dread about illness and sorrow in a friend’s family, which left me feeling a bit singed too.

So there was none of that air of birthday breathlessness. But Amit rallied around manfully by taking me out to lunch, and getting me not one but three books (plus a Tony Ross story as a return gift which N had asked for pointedly)! Unfortunately, he had to go for a shoot in the evening, which left n and me at a loose-end, so much so that she actually asked me ‘Why no friends have come for your birthday, amma?’. Thankfully, Geeta and Hemant dropped in after a terribly hectic day with a home-baked pizza – saving me from n’s disappointment and making the evening a little more celebratory.

The three lovely books Amit got were all favourites: Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (which I’ve always loved, but been too much of a kanjoos to buy); Extravagoria a collection of bilingual poetry by Pablo Neruda, who I love; and a brilliant, illustrated book by Paro Anand and Atanu Roy called Wingless. Amit says he’s bought that last for himself, but I don’t care – he might as well have bought it for me, because I am a die-hard Atanu Roy fan. He’s an old Target hand, and something about his work – like Mario Miranda’s – makes my toes curl with pleasure. I don’t know about the writing in Wingless, but the illustrations are just too too delishyus.

So signs of adulthood so far?

1. No profound sense of excitement about birthday – see above.

2. A general drop in my vanity levels – I think one of the nicer things about having a child is the way it takes you out of yourself. Being a parent whacks you out emotionally and physically so much, that you (or at least I) simply don’t care about the Inconsequentials any more. I’ve always bordered on being careless about the way I look, but for the past three years, the greatest thing on my agenda has been catching up on my sleep, and holding on to the shreds of my back-health.

Like I said, though I’ve never been beautiful or terribly vain, there are always a few things you treasure in yourself right? Relatively nice skin in my case, and the fact that I’d managed to sort of keep a check on my weight problem for the past 20 years. And now here I am – as fat as I was in school (the biggest I’ve ever been) once more, and getting by without slitting my wrists, thank you. Never thought I could survive without the occasional face ‘clean-up, toning and massage’, but I have a weird rash that has made my skin unusually sensitive, and guess what, I can live without the facials and the clear skin. Never thought that I’d end up looking like my paternal aunts who always reminded me of variations on the White Queen in Alice with their big bones and weight problems, their weird skin, their hair loss (though I don’t know if you can call it loss if the hair seems to travel south to your chin!). But I often see them in the mirror now, and it doesn't devastate me as I used to imagine it would.

Now I’m just so grateful for every day that n and all of us spend being healthy and well; and for every bit of work that comes our way. Because I know that ill-health is really the worst thing that can happen to you; and that a violence-free existence with three square meals a day is a lot to be grateful for.

Sheepish admission no. 1: How shallow do I feel really? This was a terribly bitter piece till I did the math and realised that I was 36 and not, as I had thought earlier, 37!

Sheepish admission no. 2: Everything fell into perspective with a resounding thud when I suddenly remembered that it was at 36 that my mother, who was three months pregnant with her second baby then, lost her husband in a fatal motorbike accident in Kerala. She was always a blithe soul, forever joking, singing, mimicking people and generally being youthful, childlike almost, chatty and friendly, till this huge horrible thing happened. She had the baby, picked up every piece of her life, consolidated dad’s chaotic business, held on to her job as an engineer and brought up a confused, angry ten-year-old. And she never lost her smile, her sense of humour or her good cheer.

My gift to myself this year has been the realization (unlike before when it was a mere awareness, I think) of how huge a challenge it must have been for mom. How brave she must have had to be then to plumb within all that sorrow and the morning sickness to find the determination to go on. She too must have felt like an adult finally, losing not just her husband, but also some of her innocence.
Suddenly the world must have been full of sharks – some of them very close home as I remember – and life must have been full of negativity and pain.
Suddenly, at 36, she must have felt shockingly grown up.
Suddenly, at 36, my life seems more than full of gifts and joy.

After many a scream-fest....

2007-10-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

...Comes the laptop. It crashed on the 5th, bunging a spanner in my blogging chakra. And here's a word of advise from the new, bitter me: when you buy an HP laptop, beware. We were one day away from expiry of the warranty when the thing conked, and the fuss they made! Claimed that ours was a fake invoice; that we had logged a complaint 15 days before we bought the laptop, and hence our warranty had expired (go figure!). Anyway, sheer perseverance, angry phone calls and endless emailing finally paid off.
Meanwhile, it's that time of my life again. When I make desperate, foolishly hopeful visits to the nutritionist. Before I had N, weight loss and weight gain were both easy-peasy. Now the gain part of it is miraculously easier. The loss part is tough - it's almost like what I'm trying to melt isn't fat really, but some sort of soft, pudgy-but-determined cement.
I hate the diet - as I guess I do all diets initially - and will grow to love it slowly, slowly, only if the scales start to shift a bit. If, in other words, my waistline goes back to the large it was - as opposed to the gianormous it is just now. (Then of course I'll turn into one of those diet bores who go on and on bending people's ears about their miraculous weight loss plans and this lovely dietician they know!)
I think dieticians are the Used Car Salespeople of the medical world. I mean look at how they dress - most I've met are women, and are almost always so poshly manicured, coiffed, and clothed. Always with that sheen of tastefully-used accessories and make up. Plus (now don't know if this is true or just the bile of a relatively-empty stomach talking), they always have this chirpy, twittishly happy and confident air about them. Sort of to say that you have to eat this crap, but by god, are you going to love it! They have these desperate oh just squeeze some lime over it and even death would be yummy, kind of suggestions. I think the super chirpiness comes from the fact that if you cheat a bit on your diet, you aren't going to turn over and die. Or lose a vital faculty. Unlike other medical people who you go to with this ask-me-to-swallow-glass-and-I-will air of obedience, dieticians know that they have to actually sell you a suffer now to gain three months later kind of plan. Poor things.
I am not a nice person to know just now. Expect some turbulence, everybody - those I meet every day, as well those I see here.
As if to prove my point, here's what I found on Wondermark!

Who’s afraid of Barbie Doll?

2007-10-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

I was. Still am, to some degree. What with the horrendous price tag, that pincer waist, those plastic-perfect legs, the general airhead demeanour (not to mention the toxic paint and glitter), the doll seems more like some rich paedophile’s fantasy than a toy. Barbies are structured so that they can't stand - their feet are arched exaggeratedly to convey high-heeled shoes. Way to go, doll-designers at Mattel. Let every kid aspire to grow to be a woman with a pretty face, big hair, long legs and no way to stand on her own!

Amit and I are official members of the Hate Barbie Club. We’ve always been. We were cussed enough to refuse my American niece a ‘Baahwbee’ and got her a tea set instead. When Amit’s niece wheedled for a Barbie kitchen set (“But it’s for my doll!"), we bought her a book instead. When I think of those moments of adult bull-headedness now, I cringe.

As with everything, it took a child to change us. When n was a little under two, we caught her staring up at a wall of bubblegum pink Barbie boxes in a toy store, an unusual gleam in her eyes. She said she wanted them. We took down one box and – cleverly, so cleverly – told her that she could play with the box here, but couldn’t take it home. She’d have to give it back to the Uncle in the store. It was his.

She fell for it twice. The third time she went ballistic. “No,” she screamed, “I want to take it home!” Cussedly, we distracted her and brought her back Barbie-less. It slowly grew into a rant, this Barbie craving of hers. The craving grew into an obsession, and we almost gave in, till Geeta stepped in and got it for her.

N grabbed the blonde vision and went straight for the chest. She looked up at me in wonder and said, “It has babu, amma”. Babu was the word that she’d invented for breasts. She played with the doll all evening, making us wince a bit. Our kid? The Barbie fan? Ah well. Toot sweet, her aunt Vanya got her a second Barbie, an Indian version – nicely brown-skinned, dark-haired and all – a tad more human than the blonde vision.

But after about a week or so of receiving both the dolls, n had nothing to do or say with them. She couldn’t cuddle them, play with them, nothing. Too young to care about their clothes still, I think she liked they pink packaging more. When we went out for dinner or to the park, she’d insist on taking one of her ‘babies’ along – a motley crew of seven or eight cuddly dolls, bears and a My Little Pony – to show them a good time. But never the poor Barbies. They seemed the lowest in the doll heap.

And they stayed there. She’d smile at them occasionally, and gawk at the glossy Barbie ads on TV. But nothing more. Till I noticed the other day that both the golden and the brown-haired ones were out of the toy drawer. When mom came to play with n that day, I realized the secret of its sudden appearance.

Granny and baby had invented a new game. There was a child-gobbling yakshi (Malayalam for witch) on the prowl, and all the fat teddy bears and dolls were at risk. Mom lunged at them, brandishing each Barbie in turn, and screaming, “I am the yakshi! I want to eat the baby!” N grabbed her nearest doll and scooted, laughing and screaming for her life and the doll’s. She rushed to me, flushed and excited, and said, “I saved my doll from the yakshi!”

I was surprised to see that Barbie – uber beauty queen – was named the witch. How come, I asked mom. She said that when they were planning the game it was found that n was ‘too attached’ to the other dolls. They had been named by her, and she didn’t want any of them to be made into witches. So the only thing they could find was good ol’ Barbie! Also, said mom nodding gravely, a yakshi has to be conventionally beautiful in order to draw unsuspecting people to her.

I think perhaps we – amit and me in particular – fear wily marketers (and their choice of gorgeous bubblegum pink for packaging) too much. I don’t think we trust the average child’s robustness enough (or granny’s for that matter!). Give them their Barbies, I say, and they’ll realize how useless the dolls are soon enough. Not cuddly, not believable, and simply not worth much love apparently.

(Maybe Mattel should come up with a Barbie in Macbeth? All done up in basic black with a broom and all. Might make the poor things a little more interesting.)

Magic in the pot

2007-09-28T22:19:00.001-07:00

Walked into the loo bleary-eyed last morning feeling bitterly tired (am not a morning person) and saw a gorgeous dragonfly on the door frame. It had lovely diaphanous wings and a red, lipstick red, deep scarlet body. Like a bloodied, aerodynamic dart. I called n and she dashed in. It was exactly at her eye level and she was thrilled. I wondered aloud why it had come there (because though we have lots of pretty birds outside, even owls, coppersmiths and golden orioles, I've never spotted a dragonfly before). So question asked, and big silence followed. I sleepily formed the thought in my head, 'It's landed to die of course, poor thing...' when n pops up with a "It's come to do susu." Of course, why else would it be in the loo?

This morning, she was shown a snail in the loo, a medium-sized, active little bugger with a tingling pair of antennas. Last night Amit spotted it on one wall (how had it reached the second floor, for god's sake?). It had circumnavigated the loo - if you can do that with a rectangle - and n spotted it this morning on the ceiling. Now she thinks of the loo as an extension of her park, Diamond Garden, with the gogalgaays and the dragonflys. (Gogalgaay is marathi for snail - I just love the word. So much more evocative than the English!)

Why the sudden influx of the insect world? Amit's theory is that maybe the white light of the new CFL is attracting them. Or maybe we've had them before but never paid them attention - this is the first time we're making a really big deal bec of n, our captive audience. You are welcome to add some of your own!

The penny drops...

2007-09-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

For years I've wondered why librarians and figures of authority associated with books are so brusque with me. They LOOK at me, and in that instant, they seem to spot the inner space-cadet. I am rapidly filed away - I think - as the person most likely to read a book on the bus and dreamily leave it behind; the one who's going to shove a book behind the bed and leave it there two months after the due date; the one who appears to love books but seems to see them more as friends she can eat and drink and sleep with, rather than as teachers who you sit with primly at the table.

But I've never clearly understood why they hate careless people like me so. Stupid question of course. One with an answer that I am aware of intellectually, but am unable to accept at the emotional level. Put me in a large library with an ocean of books behind the counter, and I always bridle and cringe at the same time, feeling a mix of guilt and anger. Almost instinctively I start thinking, Shit, what have I lost now; and
why-the-hell-are-they-so-anal-can't-they-smile?

Finally I've sort of got a peep into the archetype of the librarian. I re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose after many, many years, and had this eureka moment when I understood and - more importantly - accepted the Dirty Looks given to me by all librarians past.

Eco's book is a detective story set in a medieval abbey where monks spend their days illustrating manuscripts in a large scriptorium. The most fascinating parts of the novel (for me ) are the ones that dwell on the monks who illuminate the manuscripts carefully - with gold, silver, jewel-bright colors, strange figures and animals. The scriptorium and the library hold precious books. They are painstakingly hand-crafted, and are therefore irreplaceable and priceless.

The library at the Abbey is also a fulcrum of seething emotions. On the one hand, there is the fact that it is a cleverly-constructed lode of knowledge (it's built like a maze and only the librarian and his assistant are privy to the route through it). It is a store-house of learning, but there is a school of thought within the abbey which feels that while books are precious, what they contain is not suitable for everyone. Knowledge and learning untempered by piety are considered dangerous. And intellectual joy and pride are both viewed with clear suspicion.

Plus of course, each hand-crafted, hand-written and hand-bound manuscript is a delicate treasure. Too much handling might destroy them. Effectively, the library is a place that hoards books for themselves and for the future. It is not storing up on them to help young monks broaden their minds (and perhaps their desires as well).

So the monks need permission from the librarian and sometimes the abbot as well before they can read a book. The young men seethe with intellectual curiosity and many resent the system of restricted access to the library. So much so that they are willing to trade sexual favours to be able to read certain books. To frighten the curious young illustrator-writers and keep them from exploring the library at night, it is locked and hallucinogenic herbs are burnt. Rumours of ghosts-of-librarians-past are fed.

Central to all of this ferment is the librarian, a man who must be well-versed in Arabic, Greek and Latin to qualify for the job. He needs a prodigious memory and must guard his treasure passionately. The librarians are next-in-line to becoming the abbot and as the abbey is a rich, powerful one, the post is obviously covetted. Young monks and old lobby for the post. Eco's librarian, Malachi, is a clever creation - a complex man who is insecure, has power, is sexually promiscuous and not-very-learned.

I think centuries of not being able to be sure that what you write can and will be preserved in handy, sturdy hardback (or now, soft copy), has imprinted on us a fear of and adoration for the written word, and for the books where they are collected. Though often full of abstruse theological debate (which you can skim through shamelessly), The Name... puts into perspective our general tendency to regard books as things that are to be prized, to be cherished, hoarded, and generally be considered irreplaceable. Printing has been with us for a couple of centuries, but it obviously hasn't penetrated our racial subconscious yet!

Coming back to my original point: The Name... made the librarian's anxiety clear to me. If books are fragile treasures, and if I were responsible for tens of thousands of them, I don't think I'd want the likes of me to hang around either!

The Barn Owl's Dismal Capers

2007-09-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

I was very excited when Suniti lent me her copy of The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers. In fact it was around Hansa's birthday, and I wanted to rush out and get her a copy because she'd seen it somewhere and admired the drawings. Also because it seemed quite interesting to begin with. The bookstore didn't have it when I checked. And thank god for that. Because cross the first 20 pages, and the book loses its act completely.

The story is a retelling of the legend of the Wandering Jew. Here he lives in Calcutta of the 1700s as Abravanel Ben Obadiah Ben Aharon Kabariti. He records all the scandals of contemporary Cal - especially those of the British administrators - in a book called The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers. Pablo, our hero, wants to find the copy that his grandfather had picked up once in Paris. At his grandfather's death, the book was given away, and Pablo sets about looking for it in Calcutta. He meets many people in the process and this story is a little about each of them. Interesting premise, interesting beginning, but somehow, it doesn't come together at all. And it goes on for a massive 280 pages.

The problem with The Barn Owl..., I think, is something that is common to many urban Indian writers (and here I count myself in too). We have, I feel, a multiplicity of stimuli, and we want to bring it all in. Unlike people who live in sanitized societies, living in India offers you so much everyday madness to play with, that you can't bear to leave anything out. And I suspect the temptation to do so is higher in a form like the graphic novel, since it's so visual and thrives on the kitschy, the slightly batty.

In The Barn Owl... it feels as if every thing that has ever struck Banerjee as odd or delightfully eccentric about Calcutta is brought in - irrespective of its role in the larger narrative. Yes, cities have their incredibly fascinating idiosyncrasies, but does it all have to come together, like, right now?

After a point, each vignette is treated in the same way. New characters are introduced and described and located every 5 or 6 pages, and then the story carries on to another character. You feel like there's going to be a crackling crescendo at the end, but there's just a whisper of drama there. In fact, hardly any at all.

It's all very wry and ironic, but finally, it simply doesn't pull together and become that convincing story.

About the visuals: opinion in this family is divided. Banerjee, though inventive and well-schooled in the storyboard-like delineation of a graphic novel, is not a skilled artist. His drawing is honestly a bit amateurish. Amit, as an artist and illustrator, can't tolerate bad drawing in a graphic novel, because well, you wouldn't put up with bad writing in a prose novel, would you? I see his point. But initially, I was like, ok, so it's not great drawing, but I'm all for democracy in these matters. Like, I loved the mixing of old photos of Cal with illustrations. And I admired the cinematic feel in general.

In a graphic novel, I can look at the drawings as being a part of the narrative and therefore not to be considered separately (unless of course the illustrator is so good that the work becomes art!). The bigger deal for me is the story. So long as the visual style merges with the story-telling, or at least, so long as the visuals tell the story well, it's ok with me.

At the end of The Barn Owl... though, I felt massively irritated because the story hadn't worked and neither had the art. It just seemed so self-indulgent and vapid. Amit has seen reviews of Kashmir Pending, a graphic novel published by Banerjee and he says it's a whole lot better than this one - at least in terms of skill. I certainly hope so.

Want to be put off buying books?

2007-09-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here's how you do it in two easy steps:

1. Enter your local branch of Crossword.
2. Engage with any of the cretins on call - the sales staff. Their daftness, rudeness, lack of awareness, will make you want to turn and flee. Or it will make you want to do them such physical harm that the cops will have to lock you in.

At Crossword they've never ever given discounts (unless it's during an annual sale). Because, after all, you are paying for the experience, the aahm-bey-ahnce. What with the air con and the coffee-shop attached, suddenly, it seemed nice to be able to do frilly stuff while browsing for books. And what's a 10 to 20% discount as compared to that?

Where Crossword - like most chain stores - suffered a bit was in their choice of staff. They hired pretty kids - chirpy and bright as buttons, but they weren't you know, book lovers. Chalo, so not everyone lives to read, ok, and you put up with a degree of ignorance. In fact, till about 6 to 8 months back, the Crossword Ghatkopar staff was decent, vaguely knew where the books were, and were at least enthusiastic enough to try and find you stuff. And more importantly, they weren't rude creeps.

But recently, I think there's been some policy-and-management change, which has been reflected immediately in the quality of the people they hire. At least this is the case at the Crossword in Shopper's Stop, Ghatkopar. Boy, I never thought I'd miss the button kids, but compared to the new bunch of yobos they've got, those kids were great! We had a shockingly unpleasant and painful experience there two days back. Don't want to go into the gory details here, but suffice it to say that the staff were nothing short of crass, ill-mannered louts.

The dip has happened ever since the Shopper's Stop guys bought up the place. At least in Ghatkopar, the staff are: 1. lazy, and they don't believe in looking for a book beyond checking their database - and as everyone knows, databases are not always a perfect reflection of what's on the shelves (I say this because I've had this experience in a Crossword); 2. ill-mannered louts who don't have basic skills like communication and - I'm so sorry to even say this - decent manners; 3. just not aware of or or interested in books.

I don't blame them for this. But what were their employers thinking when they hired them to man bookshops? Having hired them, how about training and / or orienting them a bit? Or say, giving them a crash-course in basic courtesy? And one in understanding books - not the literary criticism stuff, mind you, but where they are stacked and how they are to be referenced on the shelves?

You go to a small book store like Fort Book Distributor or Strand or even our Chembur-station Jayesh Book Store, and you suddenly re-realize that hey, you don't need coffee to buy a book. Because you get decent service, a discount and generally, a pleasant feeling of being attended to. Mind you, the salespeople here aren't MAs in Eng Litt either. They are aware of what they have in their shelves, and want to make sure - or at least try - that you get what you are looking for.

I called the Crossword shop-in-charge later that day and complained. She was pained and appalled at her staff - I think. And offered to come over and apologize. See, this is where people lose perspective. Can you imagine the busy, highly dignified manager at the Strand desk offering to do something so daft as come over and apologise to a customer? No, because they do their jobs all right, and don't behave like jerks in general. Cussed they might be, creeps they are not.

I wish chain store managers had an awareness of what a bookshop needs to be to its customers. It needs to be no-fuss, it needs to be a wee bit generous, it needs to have staff who at least know where the goods are. That's it. Nothing more.

(Ooh, on a prophetic note, I had a dream, just two nights before this incident, that for some reason, a Japanese guy was willing to open up a bookstore with us in Chembur! Cost no issue, he said. I woke up to change n's soaked PJs thinking busily to myself: ok, we'll buy the paper bags which they make from recycled newspaper at Sevadan, and not keep any plastic, and have an old-books bargain counter. And what shall we call it... etc. I switched on the light in the loo and told myself to calm down, it was a dream. Blah. My subconscious is getting too literal. )