The annals of Indian history are rich and expansive, filled with the most amazing tales of both valour and idiosyncrasies. School textbooks often gloss over these incidents because it is impossible to capture all of these tales in one comprehensive text and also because textbooks need to build a cohesive narrative, a sequence which may not grasp the complicated and interlinked histories which spread across time and space
Open the book and you ‘see’ Shah Jahan, imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, gazing at the Taj Mahal from his prison. Reading on, and with the help of Kavita Singh Kale’s illustrations, you get pulled into the captive emperor’s thoughts and get a peep into his cherished memories. Those of the happy days spent with his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. And of the sad days too, when Mumtaz died after giving birth to their fourteenth child
A little book that says it all—from beautiful descriptions of Nature’s bounty, and the history of an ancient nation and its civilization—to memories, old and precious. It is only the talented Ruskin Bond who can do it.
What picture comes to your mind when you think of a scientist? Well, when children are presented with this question and asked to draw a scientist at work, more often than not, they draw an elderly or middle-aged man wearing a lab coat and spectacles, mixing chemicals in fancy glassware. Alarmingly, the proportion of children who hold such a stereotypical mental image of a scientist seems quite large: 86.5% in a study done in 1998[1] and 78% in a more recent study[2]!
Whenever I imagine about war, images of the aftermath of war come to my mind. Everything is scattered around. I can see only those people and things that have somehow escaped from the bombings. I can see the ominous silence spread out after the heart-rending blasts. I can see the school which has nothing left now. I can see the children who had come to school with dreams in their eyes, with the belief that everything will be alright if they study.
B.R. Ambedkar: A Life in Books, is a very imaginative and accessible introduction to one of the tallest leaders India has ever had. The book, without being pedantic, provides a young reader a bird’s eye view of life and times of Babasaheb. It does a fabulous job of introducing young minds to difficult themes such as caste-based discrimination, equity and justice.