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The charmingly titled Dhanak follows a time honoured tradition of a journey story. What is different about it is that it is also travelling through different media like a hot knife shot through butter. I haven’t seen the film, but after Anushka Ravishankar’s seamless novelization (a fine new coinage), I feel like I have. Anushka introduces the two lovable heroes, Pari and Chotu with swift ease. The piece of jaggery that a sightless Chotu catches unerringly, their walk to school that is the very first journey, reveals the family situation and their bond with an efficient economy of words. Shahrukh Khan also makes an entry in this early and we know that he is going to drive the action in some unexpected way.

Train journeys are always fascinating, especially in India. The Indian railways are the arteries of the country—they traverse the length and breadth of the nation carrying passengers and goods, all the connecting distant places past myriad drastically different landscapes—no two stations are the same, no two routes look similar. A journey in a train teaches you not just about the people, it also teaches you about geography, culture and heritage when you look out of its windows.

In this day and age of computers, the ability to write and under-stand programming is an invaluable skill. Computers now surround us—everything from our high-tech smartphones and laptops, to our microwaves and cars use programmes written in lines and lines of code (specialized languages that computers can understand). Marc Scott and Mick Marston do a wonderful job introducing this world—while aimed at young children, the book serves as an equally good guide for an older novice.

Dad, did you know, Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin to go to space?’ my eight year old daughter, who is in class 3, mentioned with excitement. I was helping her with her school project on the solar system. During the course of the project, we discovered together, the truly inspiring personal journey of Kalpana Chawla from Karnal, a small town in Haryana to her joining the NASA programme in the US as an astronaut. Kalpana’s fascination for space and flying was sparked off at a very early age. On a recent trip to the US, I had the opportunity to take my daughter to the world famous Morehead Planetarium and Science Centre in North Carolina.

When I saw the title of the book I had been asked to review Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality I was apprehensive. I assumed that the book would be another treatise on the much flogged concept of Darwinian adaptive evolution: the superior importance of population and species survival over the death of any individual of a species. But what really got my interest was the introduction and the first chapter that discussed the concept of death as envisioned as a cessation of Life; and the rational of defining life and the misunderstanding that till now exist in our definition of ‘What is Life??’

Dear Aburva, I appreciate your reasons for writing this book. As a young person who reflects on a lot of things, you want to connect with others like yourself and like your parents so that they may understand each other. In this instance, you have focused on your passion for dance, bharatanatyam in particular, how you were briefly distracted from it owing mainly to peer pressure, and how you returned to it and performed the arangetram, your first solo public performance of bharatanatyam. Along the way you have shared your impressions of Oman, where you live; you have provided information about Chidambaram, the town your father hails from and also important for the temple dedicated to Nataraja and Govindaraja, and in Hindu thinking believed to be the venue of Shiva’s cosmic dance.