Subhadra Sen Gupta

I remember picking up Roopa Pai’s The Gita, for Children at an airport bookstore and while flipping through the pages spotted a subhead that said, ‘A Killer App for Contentment’ and I knew the book was for me. Then all through the flight I was doodling through the pages and smiling at the whacky take on a very solemn and ancient treatise. It made that crunched-into-the-economy-class-middle-seat experience sort of bearable.

Now to my delight Pai has taken on something even tougher than the Gita—the Vedas and the Upanishads. As a reluctant reader of Indian philosophy, I have to confess that I doze off every time I open any tome by S Radhakrishnan, finally here was a book that explains it in my lingo. I know that many adult readers will find this book both easy to read and enlightening. Imagine someone making the ‘neti neti’ line easy to understand without using words that need a dictionary to decipher.

For a book on a complex subject like the Vedas and the Upanishads the research has to be impeccable and then it has to be presented in a light and humorous manner that children can relate to and that is not easy at all. Pai is becoming very adept at this challenge.