Neither Bhojpur nor ‘Naxalism’ stand at the heart of the issues which this book raises. The places, the dates, the individuals—and the ‘-ism’ attributed to them-pale into relative insignificance besides the deeper causes, and the long-running continuities, of the struggle for land rights and human dignities which is the real substance of this work.
Perky and precocious, Tiya the parrot lives in the great big banyan tree which is home to thousands of creatures—feathered bipeds, quadrupeds, centi, deci and millipedes. Tiya’s is a secure and comfortable existence amidst his many neighbours in a place where nothing changes but the seasons. Indeed….
The Puffin Book of Classic Stories for Girls was first published in 2010. Its title is misleading and yet not, depending on what you understand by ‘stories.’ These are neither original stories nor all short stories nor all of them written originally for girls or even for children in general…
The Storyteller: Tales from the Arabian Nights is a pretty good version of the Arabian Nights for children. It has some of the not so well-known stories in it such as ‘The King and the Physician Douban’ and ‘The Diamond Anklet,’ as well as well known ones, tailored for child readers. The familiar but very long story of Aladdin has been broken…
The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhandar the Iron Man and Other Stories has four terrific stories. ‘The Giant of the Bakery’ is about Molka the Giant, a fantastic baker. He comes to ‘a nice little town by the sea which is neither too noisy, nor too quite, and had neither too many people, nor too few,’ a perfect little town to start his own bakery…
When Ritu goes shopping in an ordinary mall in an ordinary city on an ordinary day and takes a perfectly ordinary elevator to the lowest floor, the last thing she expects is to step out into the Underground Forest. Trapped in this gloomy Forest, Ritu meets the Resident Magician, Serendipitous, and his assistant, Blanc-Noir…