Tag Archives: For Beginners

Aaah! Lizard’, was my expression when I saw one in the kitchen. But as I kept looking at it, I observed it looking at the fruit flies and that brought about a realization for me: It was there because of those fruit flies hanging around my food peels bin near the kitchen sink. After I ate my food, the flies had found their food and the lizard found its in turn.

Deepa Agarwal’s Traveller’s Ghost is the story of three teenagers—Kriti, Mohit and the journalist Neel Pargat. The story starts in the hilly town of Banari where the families have gone for a holiday.

Festival: the very word conjures up images of good food and new clothes. And yet, whose is the celebration? What does a festival mean to the dispossessed, the marginalized? Bama’s Pongal takes this head on, with the very first sentence, ‘Pongal after Pongal, Madasami would pay his respects to his landlord and do whatever he had to, as tradition demanded.

Twelve-year-old Nimmi Daruwala is not an outdoorsy person. However, Mr Bakshi, the ‘kind and enthusiastic’ Principal of Vidya World School, decides that a Team Building Camp would be the best way to launch the school year for troublesome Grade 7.

Many of the stories in this collection are designed to attract young readers, including the reluctant reader! The humorous story that gives the book its title, ‘The Ghost who Played Tennis’ by Santhini Govindan, opens with the tantalizing statement, ‘Shankar did not believe in ghosts until he met one.’

Boom Boom is the story of Sura, a young boy living with his mother in Velankanni in Nagapattinam. He spends his days selling stickers at the Velankanni Church, playing with his friends, and climbing coconut trees.

Who clicked that pic? If there is a question in the title of the book, then there is bound to be curiosity. Today, when mobile cameras are common in most hands, older readers will be nostalgic seeing the cover, and younger readers full of regret that they did not get to see this two-lens heavy weight camera.

Children are always restless and ready to go out and play, be it day or night. Tariq also wants to go out and play at night but does not have permission to do so. Then he comes up with a plan! But his plan creates a problem for the old, wise Owl.

Kannada has seen a long tradition of writing for children starting with the 1845 publication of a translation of Aesop’s Fables followed by the first book for children written originally in Kannada, a book of moral stories by MS Puttanna, the Nitichintamani that was published in 1884.

While Nandita’s short stories have been published in collections like Talking Cub’s Dance, Nani, Dance, this is a first book which is entirely a collection of her short stories.

These words from the book offer a beautiful summary of the story that is Afo and I. At its heart is Vinoka and Afo’s sibling relationship. Jimo superimposes Vinoka’s feelings about his sister Afo moving away with changes happening in their landscape.

It is indeed a special feature of stories that they travel, continuously; passed on from one generation to the next. With time and with the tellers, each story gets a new addition to it, appearing more and more relatable to the listeners.

13 Kahaniyan is an enriching compilation of 13 stories in Hindi, each carrying valuable lessons, meticulously curated and edited by Kusumlata Singh and published by the Children’s Book Trust. Within this literary treasure-trove, the stories paint a vivid picture of diverse societal issues and human experiences.

The three books strung together can be read in continuation with one another. Laltu Se Gupshup has curious questions and observations of children yet to touch their teens, their little world cocooned around parents and their interactions to the sun, moon and the stars. Tuntuni and The Uprising deal with simple yet important issues of our everyday lives.

Children’s literature reminds one of life’s simpler joys and how everything is driven by curiosity alone. The book Wingless Flight and Others is published by Children’s Book Trust, a publication house founded by cartoonist K. Shankar Pillai in 1957.

Here is an interesting title capturing all the necessary elements that evoke interest to pick a book to
Read: mystery, wonder and mention of a strange unique place, the Uparwale Gaon. The author has not only succeeded in arousing interest through the title, but she also manages to sustain it throughout.

This joyful little book by Rajiv Eipe is the perfect way for a young reader to enter the magical universe of books and reading, by being transported into a world seen from the wonder-filled eyes of a little boy.

Aithihya’s abstract art amply illustrates the theme and intent of this little ‘wordless’ book as the young reader is shown rather than told, about the monstrous impact of all the plastic we so thoughtlessly litter our world with. The Cyclops-like creature is the eponymous Plasto who devours our waste with voracious delight and assumes awesome proportions as its gluttony finds enough to satisfy it. Very soon the monster becomes bigger than the human beings on the page and turns into a real threat as it dominates the landscape and takes over. Since this is a book for young readers, the dystopian images are effectively balanced with a solution, the eco-warriors who valiantly cut the monster down to size as they reuse, reduce and recycle, and segregate the waste into manageable proportions. The devil is in the detail and this book demands that each page be ‘read’ carefully for the images are the text. The speed with which the monster grows is a timely warning and the carefully drawn panels on the closing pages, a clear reminder of how laborious the process of reversing this damage can be. Aithihya has chosen well to use only the power of images to tell her story and hopefully convert all the readers of the book into eco-advocates who will save the planet from the evil monster thoughtless human beings have created.

Meera Ganapathi’s text and Rohit Kelkar’s illustrations that complement it make this book a sensitive intervention about the importance of love and understanding in everyone’s life, especially someone who is visibly ‘different’ and suffers for it.

As I opened the first page of this moving story by Rajiv Eipe, I found so much to absorb my attention that I spent a happy time weaving stories around the urban landscape and the minutiae that filled it with life.