An interesting title, and on the face of it this book is all about a cooking club in Chowpatty, Mumbai. However, the title turns out to be rather misleading, for here is a story of India’s freedom movement as told by 10-year-old Sakina in the form of diary entries in 1942. Set in Mumbai within sprawling Parsi and Muslim households, the idea of fighting for freedom is fast gaining ground with Gandhiji’s Quit India movement.
I must begin by saying that I loved this book. Name Place Animal Thing is about growing up as a Khasi girl in the ever politically-charged Shillong. It is a book of connected stories rather than a novel or novella (as the inner cover describes it), the stories connected by the first-person narrator referred to as D. The stories are told by an adult narrator who is recollecting her past, her childhood and young adulthood.
The story takes off on the school terrace with a young student manipulating a surveillance drone that captures a deadly secret of missing children and a shadowy figure known only as the Dragon. Two teenagers, April, a resident of Imphal and Shalini from the mainland living there with her father, an army man, jump into the plot to unravel the secrets running below the surface of this land, confronted at the onset, with the disappearance of a bright young boy handling the drone
A story imagined in the backdrop of World War II and India’s Freedom Struggle. The protagonist of the story is a 16-year-old girl, Kayal. The story unravels as she maintains a journal to record her journey from her orthodox home in Madras to the war camp of Netaji’s Azad Hind Fauj in Burma and beyond. It is all about how the life of this school-going teen, with a patriotic fervour, takes a sudden turn when she leaves the traditional home of her parents who are all set to marry her off to 18-year-old Shiva.
Chatur Chanakya vs the World Wide Web is the sequel to Radhakrishnan Pillai’s first delightful book, Chatur Chanakya and the Himalayan Problem, which introduced readers to the Super Six gang of Ganesh colony including Chanakya, the pale, slender and rather unlikely hero.
Amma, Take Me to the Taj Mahal is the latest addition to the ‘Amma Take Me’ series written by Bhakti Mathur. In the earlier books Amma took her two sons to the Golden Temple, Tirupathi, Dargah of Salim Chishti and Shirdi. As the author, Bhakti Mathur, says in her introductory note, ‘The series is an attempt to introduce children to the places of historical interest and different faiths in India