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A colourful kaleidoscope of originals from well known writers, traditional favourites from OLUGUTI TOLUGUTI collection—sounds and resonances from a world familiar to children.’ This smartly written blurb had me in a tizzy of excitement, eager to read the rhymes and to become a child myself. I’m happy to say the book did not disappoint. Tulika’s Dum Dum Dho is a fun collection of Indian rhymes both new and old; the new ones written by favourite authors like Sandhya Rao, Manjula Padmanabhan, Zai Whitaker and Jeeva Raghunath, and the oldies sourced from Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Mizo and many other languages.

Poverty is often a concept many of us find ourselves uncomfortable discussing. We get discomfited by them and react with varying combinations of indifference, irritation or pity, and seek to forget them as soon as possible. We distance ourselves by imagining the poor as some sort of separate being—either idealizing them or villainizing them, but inevitably making caricatures who do not resemble ‘people’ we can identify with. Rinchin and Manjari Chakravarti’s The Trickster Bird is a beautiful and very important story which narrows the chasm between ‘us’ an ‘them’ and presents a small cross-section of the life of a little rag picker girl who lives in the city and ekes out a living with her family.

Just as Dennis feels isolated because he is not understood by others, Clumsy! is a book about a little girl with two left feet and all thumbs—food spills on her clothes, milk tumbles from her glass, and things just seem to ‘wobble, tumble and shatter’ around her. She faces constant reprimands and recriminations, teasing and scolding, until she begins to withdraw into herself and all the thoughts she finds herself unable to voice fill her head, and which express themselves became pictures and drawings of the world around her.

As that old song goes ‘Everybody needs somebody’—someone who understands and accepts you as you are, and can enter into your schemes and plans. The ‘someone’ in question need not be a romantic partner—often our closest relationships can be with a friend, who stands with you through thick or thin, and just gets you. But the corollary to this is that because our friendships are with people we can relate to, those to whom we can’t often get treated as outsiders and can feel isolated and alone.

Everyone loves Gajapati Kulapati, a cheerful young el-ephant who is friendly with everyone. And because of this, people love giving ‘little’ snacks to him! But what happens when a rather young elephant eats ten bunches of bananas, a big bundle of sugarcane, coconuts, jaggery, and rice…all at once? The stomachache which results is as painful as it is inevitable, and it worries the young elephant’s friends, who rush about to try to help him. The book is a happy and cheerful little story with simple words and evocative sounds, but which can be a springboard into discussions about moderation about eating ourselves, or moderation and being careful about feeding animals—be they pets or just our friendly strays on the street.

Lion Goes for a Haircut is another lovely children’s story, this one on why lions don’t get haircuts. Anyone who has ever had cats or been around them, may have noticed that they either studiously avoid looking at mirrors, or if they accidentally do, will hiss and puff themselves up to scare the image away. Well, the hero of this book is a lion who casually strolls into a hair cutting saloon, happily handles a computer as he takes a photo of himself and photoshops various options to see which hairstyle suits him most, then turns towards the mirrors in the saloon, and turns into a pussy!! He is so befuddled by the images that he runs back into the forest.