Deepak Dalal’s Vikram Aditya series, of which The Snow Leopard forms a part, are a truly delightful addition to literature for children written in India. C.S Lewis once remarked that a ‘a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’
This is a study that attempts to deal with too many topics. Although there is much to the argument that an understanding of the current international system presupposes a knowledge of history, Chatterjee has put together an incoherent mixture of ideas…
How did story come to be born? The stories in this collection show how, overarmed by the forces of nature and strange and mysterious natural phenomena, early man invented stories to explain everything—lightning and thunder, the sun, the moon and the Milky Way birds and beasts and forests.
Vibrant colors and a quirky illustration of a pink monster with autorickshaw horns, draws you in. Flip through the book to assess it, and the Indian names gladden your heart. Ah! A children’s book set in an Indian scenario. Awesome. Anushka Ravishankar does a great job of narrating the interesting incidents in Moin’s life as he deals with the ownership of a monster.
Remember all those Enid Blyton stories that you used to love? You’d grab a Famous Five or Five Find-Outers mystery, and retire to a corner, engrossed in the adventures of Julian and George, or Fatty and Bets, laughing or gasping alternatively as they went rootling into crumbling houses, discovered secret passages or were caught by the local policeman.
The book under review is a reprint, with a short editorial introduction, of Wickenden’s Report on the Disturbances of 1942-43. This secret document from the old files of the British Government has been published for the first time, since this ‘important’ document, according to the editor ‘remains unutilized by scholars and historians of Indian Freedom struggle’…