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PADHNA, ZARA SOCHNA
Namita Ranganathan by Krishna Kumar Jugnu Prakashan, New Delhi, 2019, 64 pp., 200.00
November 2020, volume 44, No 11

Worries about the reading habit in children steadily being on a decline in present times have been expressed by all those who interact and deal with them. Be it parents, teachers, counsellors, school librarians and psychologists, the refrain is the same. There is explicitly expressed anxiety by all about how children fail to develop interest in reading despite such a wide spectrum of literature being available to them. This literature addresses their needs for fantasy cognition, adventure, living in a self-constructed imaginary and often illusory world, being champions of a cause, friendship, family and school and peerbonding, etc., but yet they are not enticed by it. The usual adult analysis attributes this to the invasion of the audio-visual and social media in which television, internet and Google as a prototype search service, are identified as the main culprits which capture children’s minds and determine how they wish to live their lives. However, it is important to recognize that while this may be so to some extent, the truth may actually lie elsewhere!

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