Volume XXXIV No. 11 – NOVEMBER 2010

A slim volume, you pick up the book imagining that it is contains short chicken-soup-ish love stories. It is however, an unfortunate compilation of unanchored thoughts.

Cynicism and hopelessness often tint our view of the political situation in our country and with news channels painting bleak pictures for us twenty-four hours a day, an almost existential sort of hopelessness tends to grip us from time to time.

Our bhasha oral traditions are replete with stories which have no purpose except to make children have a hearty laugh, be it about an old woman who scares away a tiger with loud farts or a daughter-in-law who outwits her mother-in-law in cunning but entertaining ways.

The Peacock in the Chicken Run is part of the four novellas in the short fiction series launched by Tranquebar Press. Aimed at frequent commuters who travel light and love nothing more than a story while they wait to board, the protagonists of these series are often those who find themselves in transit.

If you are in the mood for an intergalactic adventure, the eleventh adventure in the Aditi series, Siril and The Spaceflower is a good read. When one of Jupiter’s moons, Eu, goes off orbit, it’s up to Siril the ant to convince his friends that she needs help! Siril is known for being rational, of course, but Beautiful Ele has her doubts.

Small noses catch small colds. Big noses catch big colds.’ Such is the indisputable, childlike logic of Ashok Rajagopalan’s latest from Tulika—Gajapati Kulapati.

A translation of Bangla children’s stories? My first reaction was one of excitement at the authors featured— Sukumar Ray, Lila Majumdar, Shibram Chakrabarty, Ashapurna Debi…a child’s staple diet when we were growing up in Calcutta.

Beginning with nine-year-old Keshav’s desire to go to a place that is cold, triggered by his mother’s sweating in the heat as she works, The Snow King’s Daughter translates that desire into an exploration of exile and the loss of a home.

Leila Seth’s We, The Children of India is a beautiful window that opens to the basics of the Indian Constitution. The book explores what a citizen should know about his/her country and the most important book of the nation.

At a time when the children’s ‘edutainment’ industry strives towards luring the urban child into the finger-clicking world of instructional video, computer games and mono-directional communication that leaves little space for the child’s imagination to take roots, Nina Sabnani’s ‘stand-up’ book published by Tulika emerges as a trend-setter.

Monkey is tired of the tourists clicking away, each time they visit the jungle. So he decides to monkey around with a camera himself, and manages to find a Polaroid, too!Monkey Photo follows Monkey, as he jumps from tree to tree, swinging here, there and everywhere trying to catch the leopard’s spots, the snakes on the tree, cheery tigers, enthusiastic birds and a host of other creatures that fill the forest with their colourful presence.

As the mother of young readers, I love to introduce them to different genres all the time.After the loss of a dear family member, grief has been something we have been grappling to come to terms with, for the last few years.While it was tough initially, my children and I learnt that the person is still with us in many of the memories that we continue to share and the book My Grandfather Aajoba helped fill that void, beautifully.

The Red Pyramid is the first of the Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan who updated Greek mythology in his Percy Jackson stories: Olympus is parked above Manhattan, and Percy (Perseus) is Poseidon’s son in a twenty-first century order of demigods.

The premise of the book is a pleasant surprise as you realize that a person from one religion is making an effort to understand another’s as well as bridge the gap between two communities.

This book is aimed at teaching Mathematical concepts to middle school children in an interactive and fun way. Or as the author puts it, this book would help you ‘think about mathematics’ and ‘learn to think about mathematics’.

The education system and schools are currently under the scanner and it has become fashionable to blame all our woes on our ‘faulty education system’. Teachers, particularly, are soft targets: poor pedagogy,

Social Science Learning in Schools explores the central role of the teacher, importance of textbooks, and methods of social science enquiry in teaching-learning processes of school education in India.