A few months ago, I watched the film Back to the Future, an American science fiction film made in three parts. There, the protagonist, Marty, and his friend move across time and space, to the future to save lives and to the past for solving scientific experiments that have gone askew. Science fiction has been a part of various art forms in the West for centuries.
This is a ‘novel for adolescents’, a thing that is hard to define. But the necessary condition for an adult writing a ‘novel for the adolescents’ is that the writer must return to her own adolescence, because years of growing up alter the life of the writer significantly as compared to the life projected in the story. Yet, the writer retains a flow of perspective on the world and life, and on the philosophical outlook.
True to the genre of science fiction, this volume is teeming with aliens and spaceships, time travel, robots, the future world and amazing scientific inventions that tempt wrong-doers and children alike. A wonderful collection of sci-fi short stories that will tantalize young minds.The stories are told from the perspective of a child-hero who interacts with the adult world or even aliens on his own terms.
Konkani is spoken in four States—Goa and the coastal regions of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. There are 40 lakh speakers, of which about 16 lakhs are in Goa. There are five scripts used for writing Konkani—Malayalam, Kannada, Devnagari, Roman and Arabic. Recently, the Konkani community from Kerala decided to switch the script from Malayalam to Devnagari. With such diversity, an apparent challenge that one may encounter in Konkani literature is of transliteration.
To comment on the current status of literature in Gujarati, overall and on contemporary literary trends, would be a contentious matter. It would be pertinent, thus, to limit the scope of this write-up to sharing some contemplations on the current status of Children’s Literature (CL), based on our experiences and engagement.The scenario in Gujarati CL is not encouraging.
Language is not only a means of exchange of ideas, it is one of the most reliable mediums of expression. It is also an importance means for the development and social-cultural identity of a society. Without language, humans are incomplete and disjunct from their traditions.