It takes a village... even to have fun!

Was the world a better place when I was growing up? Life was harder, for sure. Mom was an office-goer, grandma was strict, teachers were sticklers, and worst of all, TV had one black-and-white channel where the highlight was aapan yanna pahilat kaa - a show that listed out names and descriptions of missing people. If we were really lucky, we caught the fleeting, animated Amul ad.
My daughter has it easier - freelance, stay-at-home parents; a choice of wildly similar cartoons and reality shows on TV; and apparently, a liberal academic system. What does she lack that I had? I guess the answer is friends. Friends who live nearby and are just one loud, afternoon-nap-ruining yell away. We had this growing up - friends who were always ready for play, fights, trips to the corner shop and sharing comics.
Now we live in a neighbourhood of low-rises, where all the young people have left, following jobs that take them to where other young couples - and their kids - are. We live among retirees and are indisputably the only people of child-bearing age around. Our kid, therefore, has no playmates.
In fact, our neighbourhood is so kid-free that BMC’s Pulse Polio staff took a long time to figure out that we existed and needed reminders and booster doses. This may make no sense to the un-kidded among you, but those with kids know that the Pulse Polio people are the most dedicated sniffer-outers of children under five. It took them time to find us, and that is saying a lot. When they found us, they shook their heads in wonder and said, ‘Kisko maloom tha ki iss building mein bhi bachche hai...’
So we started taking baby to the garden. The few kids who turned up there were a floating population. The only permanent people were the grannies, and though our child loved playing with the arthritic old ladies, it was obvious that she needed peers.
Young couples with kids automatically seem to gravitate towards the newer gated complexes, and since we couldn’t move to one of those, playdates seemed like a solution. But fixing up ‘appointments’ for toddlers is an insanely awkward and pointless exercise. Firstly, it’s not like you’re walking into the neighbour’s place for a game of ‘house-house’. So it’s not casual. The moms and dads have to like and ‘approve of’ each other. Then schedules have to be discussed and tweaked. It all begins to feel way too strained, artificial, and too much like work.
What I wanted was for my kid to have a village of her own. A set of friends to play, fight and gossip with every day. Children need to build relationships outside the comfort zone of families, so that they understand the dynamics of social intercourse. This knowledge is so important that most tribal societies have formal spaces like youth dormitories and age-sets to foster it.
Just when I was about to give up hope, I met an old schoolmate in the garden, who generously said, “Come play in our building, there are many kids.” So I located her building, about eight streets away from us, full of young people, their kids, and their friends’ kids. A small oasis of 25 children! Presto, my daughter had her village, albeit a bit further from home than I liked.
At first, playing with peers was difficult for her. So far her playmates had been obliging adults. Children are instinctively not polite or obliging to one another - with them, you have to, like in the jungle, earn your stripes. So every evening would end in a fight and her howling loudly, and yet, come the next evening, she wanted to go back.
Some time later, in a shop, she picked out a yellow Tantra t-shirt which said: ‘Friends are better than TV’. Maybe she just fancied the colour, but I like to imagine that she was trying to say something.

This article appeared in the DNA dated Aug 28, 2011.

The Big, Fat Indian Birthday

In the six-odd years that I have been chaperoning my kid to birthday parties, I’ve figured that party-wise, there are broadly two kinds of city parents: those who approach their kids’ birthday parties with the same determination that soldier-ants take to gathering food, and those who, like the grasshopper in the folktale, simply outsource the stress.

The soldier-ant-type of parent (mostly the mother) frets, plans and slogs for the birthday party, tearing out her hair and getting irritable bowel syndrome in the process. Fathers are usually assistant-sloggers, perfect for random running around and sacrificing their pollution-weakened lungs to blow balloons.

The grasshopper-type parent, meanwhile, hands it all over to a new breed of professional — the event manager. Mum and dad make phone calls, sign a few cheques, and go for a film or a pedicure. The event manager gets everything from food and ‘games’ to return gifts.

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It’s weird, but both the grasshoppers and the soldier-ants take pride in their distinct parties. Stoically, the soldiers flaunt their small, home-made, parent-driven parties. The grasshoppers meanwhile take pride in the fact that their kids’ birthdays are large-scale, ‘exciting’ and more importantly, managed by the hired help. I’d like to state here that I’m a soldier-ant-mum, and I have my husband’s fatigued lungs to prove it.

Growing up in the ’70s, for us a birthday party meant paper plates, chips, a sandwich and a slice of lurid-looking cake. It meant money in an envelope pressed into the birthday kid’s hand. It meant some noise, some Rasna, and ok-tata-bye-bye. But in the Noughties, in globalised India, if it doesn’t hurt the wallet, it’s not just worth it.

Five parties out of the 10 we attend have one or more of the following:

• a bouncy castle which teeters close to the sky and looks downright scary
• glittery, eco-unfriendly, thermocol banners featuring sundry Disney Princesses/Spiderman/Ben 10 ‘cartoons’ which are supposed to define the party’s theme
• a young college student with an accent straight out of an Andheri East call centre as the Master of Ceremonies — my daughter calls this person ‘the manager’
• rehearsed performances by the birthday kid’s older sisters/cousins, featuring highly-sexualised Bollywood numbers — you cringe, but since the parents look like their child has just ended world hunger, you nod and say, ‘Verrrry nice…’
• a magic show (with frightened rabbits/doves) + a tattoo artist + a caricaturist + a hair braider-and-colourer (horrible chemical colours on your child’s head, but never mind)
• games that make your toes curl. Like ‘pick the dad with the biggest paunch’ or asking the birthday kid’s father to choose the best dancer among the assembled mummies, who obligingly shimmy for him

Recently, at a 4-year-old boy’s birthday party, after the professional clowns had romped on the stage, we were in for a hitherto unseen treat. The ‘manager’ invited the headmaster of the child’s playschool to ‘say a few words about the birthday boy’. The guests’ jaws dropped in unison. Listening to a speech in praise of someone who has just stepped out of diapers is a mildly surreal experience.

Then there are the return gifts. Caboodles of plastic crap, made in the dark by-lanes of Shenzhen, China. The bags, folders, water-bottles, tiffin-boxes and melamine-laced plate-and-spoon-sets are all given to kids who don’t really need more stuff. A rare, brave parent will sometimes risk popularity and give out potted plants or books.

It’s all meant to feel like a carnival, I guess, a mindless motion of money and ‘enjoyment’. In a perfect world, a birthday party wouldn’t be that, I think. It would mean experiencing something new and life-changing, something that truly celebrates a milestone. Learning about fish or butterflies, going to a farm, a nature walk or a fun session at the museum, or discovering a craft together. Till that happens, let’s aim at less wasteful, more conscious and aware birthday parties.

It’s a dirty job, but some-mum’s got to do it!

This appeared in the DNA of Sunday, July 24, 2011

New books - published by Pratham!

written in 2001, the idea for this story was suggested by amit. then he worked with me to whet it, and later gouri worked on it a lot (special, special thanks for her editorial genius and patience). i sent it to puffin, where sayoni basu at puffin liked it, and though they didn't publish it finally, sayoni pulled me into a lot of fun projects - like the puffin book of bedtime stories, and the tenth rasa.
ambili is a much-travelled story, and finally, she found her form and her book at pratham, where manisha chaudhary was kind enough to choose to publish her! venkat raman singh shyam drew and painted her, in his lovely, restful style... so here she is, in her own story, ambili meets the king!
i love that the idea came from a gujju, was written by a mallu, illustrated by a pardhan gond artist from madhya pradesh...













giju bhai again, is someone i met thru amit and we worked with his folk nonsense in the tenth rasa too. after translating poetry for the tenth rasa, i really wanted to try some prose. then i met sampurna murti of pratham, and turns out they were thinking of translating giju bhai's stories - thru a hindi re-telling of them illustrated by aabid surti.
it was an exciting project, as i worked with both versions - aabid bhai's and giju bhai's. during this project, amit also chanced upon the gujarati giju bhai version he had read as a child, illustrated by aabid bhai!
so here the two volumes are, full of some of the nicest, cheeriest folk stories. and filled with aabid bhai's funny drawings. hope you find them near you people, or else look up their site. you could order online or find a store near you using their store locator.

Of sleeping and swearing

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bull***t. Stop lying.
Lie the **** down, my darling, and sleep…


Not my lines, but lord, I wish they were. Novelist Adam Mansbach, exhausted with his daughter Vivien’s refusal to sleep, wrote the hilarious, cathartic poem Go the **** to Sleep. While its gentle rhymes and brilliant illustrations (by Ricardo Cortés) make it look like a picture book, it is definitely not to be read to your child. Not unless you want her to grow up with the vocabulary of a truck driver. Because this best-selling ‘children’s book for adults’ is about a father swearing at his child’s reluctance to fall asleep.

I can see your raised eyebrows from here. The thing is, till you have tried to put a reluctant child to sleep, you have NO IDEA how tough it can be. Most young parents learn — the hard, humbling way — that kids have their own body clocks. In two years or so you recognise this, and officially give up hope. You may have dinner plates to wash or a cure for cancer to invent or your limbs may be falling off from sheer exhaustion. But baby won’t fall asleep till he wants to. There are still so many toes and fingers to play with, and so much of your hair to pull. It’s enough to make you want a village to raise your child with!



Sleep patterns vary. Some kids sleep at 8pm and wake up shiny-faced at 6am. Some young debauches bounce off the walls till 12am and then crash, only to come around at about 10am the next day. Mine sleeps late and wakes up early. At 11.45 in the night, when my eyelids droop shut in the middle of some story she is telling me, she pulls them apart so that I can listen to her more attentively. At an obscene 6.45am, she’s up again (only on holidays) having remembered some crucial detail she forgot last night.



I have realised that sleep deprivation is a fairly refined device of torture. A friend’s mother who had two kids in quick succession spent the next few years waking up at night for this one’s feeds and that one’s pee. She thought she would never ever sleep again, that her life would pass by in a miasma of tired un-sleptness. The frustrated sense that Mansbach calls ‘…being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again...’ Imagine, then, having twins or triplets.

As kids grow, their exploration of the day’s stimulus becomes more verbal. My kid isn’t obsessed with her toes now; she has questions. How did cavemen have babies — there were no doctors to cut their tummies open? Why we have skin? Why are kids mean in class? Why are you mean to me? Can I be an actress? A dancer? Do taps need electricity? I know that the kind thing to do is to retire early, giving her the time to talk through her thoughts. But life has this way of making bhartha out of my best intentions, and invariably bedtime is a tug-of-war between my ‘Go-to-sleep!’ and her ‘Amma-one-last-thing!’

One of our unforgettable bedtime discussions featured the question ‘What are fathers for?’ To look after you, I say, yours feeds and bathes you, no? Frustrated, she sits up. ‘No, I mean before that — the mummy carries the baby inside her stomach. What is the daddy for?’ So she’s talking biology, I’m talking sociology. And to save myself time, I’m being thick too.

God knows I’m not shy of discussing anatomy. But late at night, sleep and chores tugging at my mind, I want to quote Mansbach, be a bad parent and say, ‘No more questions. This interview’s over…’ Go the bleep to sleep, kid!


This appeared in the DNA of Sunday, June 19, 2011

Swapping stories and postcards!

We took part in Zoe Toft's International Postcard Swap this year. It was a way to get n excited about her drawing and her copious reading - as this vacation had us pretty sadly under-engaged, what with her chicken pox and my bad back. She drew about 7 really lovely postcards (including the 'potatoe monster' who 'eats dishes' above) and had great fun choosing from among her books, and then re-reading all her favourite - and sometimes forgotten - books.

So this was our list:
Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr Seuss, illustrated by Roy McKie. An elegant and hilarious read. N has long given up on picture books and beginner readers, but every now and then, she sneaks back to them, looking inside for fun. We found this one in Pondicherry, and I was going to gift it away till I caught her reading and re-reading it, and chortling into her chin. When we spoke about recommending books, this was one of her first shouts!


The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang. another total favourite of n's. just loves loves loves this wordless books, even going back to it repeatedly. Molly bang, wherever you are, you have two hardcore fans in India. More about how we got the book here.

The BFG by Roald Dahl. Her first proper big novel. Finished all 200 pages of it last month, using a bookmark and feeling extremely serious. loves it to madness, esp the bits about how people from different parts of the world taste different! ('people from india taste of ink!') She found the giant's names and their specific 'tastes' in kids too funny. wanted to make a play of it, with herself as sophie (what a surprise, i say!)

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise brown - a long-forgotten read, was happily pulled out because we got a 2-yr-old and a 3-yr-old in our list. a very sweet, calming read, and used to be our bedtime story for a bit.

Pete's a Pizza by William Steig. It's raining outside, Pete cant go to play. He has these rather elderly parents or grandparents with him, who look at him calmly and proceed to make a pizza out of him, using checkers, paper pieces, talcum powder and liberal amounts of tickling. When the sun comes out, Pete walks off. All very wry and unsentimental and great fun.

Nonie's Magic Quilt by You-know-who. How could n resist recommending a book about herself? We sent Rose, from France, a copy of the book too!


On the Way Home by Jill Murphy, about a little girl who can't resist telling a reeeeally tall tale. I was surprised to find n wanting to recco it bec its been a while since she last read it. But it's a really mad, lovely book.

The Why-why Girl by Mahashweta Devi. I was insistent that we recco more Indian books, but managed to get only two in. This is one of n's favourites and she has it in marathi and in english. it's a story about a tribal girl and the life she lives, told with an unusual lightness... I do hope the family manages to find a copy!


Tuesday by David Wiesner - surreal and scary, it's a wonder that most kids love this book as much as adults do. a quiet swamp, floating frogs, puzzled fish and hardboiled detectives. what more could a kid ask for in a book?

Thinking Thepla, Eating Idli

If you marry someone from another ethnic group in India, two things could happen. Either your parents never talk to you again, or, if they are nice, normal people, they mutter hopeful homilies like, ‘Children of inter-caste-marriages are always very clever…’ Luckily, it’s a while before you learn about the realities of living with differences. As a Malayalee married to a Gujarati, I could tell you a bit about this.

Finally, it all comes down to food and drink. Mallus believe that drinking hot water boiled with jeera, dhania or sunth in summer actually cools the body down. I never drank ice-cold, fridge-water at home, growing up. Once, around 5, I mistook a small bottle of white vinegar for water, grabbed it and drank deep before anyone could stop me. If they saw me, they'd take away the bottle, I knew. My lips turned blue, mom says, but I refused to let go of that bottle. Somehow, in Kerala, anyone wanting to drink ice-cold-water is morally weak and just asking for a sore throat. For the first year of our marriage, the fridge was a silent war zone. He would put in bottles of water, I would take them out. It seemed wrong somehow, to be serving cold water at home. I mean, whatever next? My mum still doesn’t get why her son-in-law blanches at the Malayalee summer cooler: hot, pale-yellow, jeera-infused water.

Perhaps it’s because he’s from Kathiawad, where drinking cold water feels like a minor religious experience. In summer, my mother-in-law freezes vatis of boiled water and then tosses the little bowls of ice into a large vessel of boiled-and-cooled water. Guiltily, I drink glassfuls, while looking around furtively for a yelling adult. The fridge wars have ceased.

Likewise, breakfast in a Mallu house is serious business, with idli, dosha, upma or appam. In a Gujju house, breakfast is the time you kill, munching homemade naasta before a delicious hing-and-gur-tinged lunch. When the sun sets, you want to eat light, and it’s time for a ‘prograam’. A bhel, bhajiya, dhokla or paani-puri no prograam. I watched awe-struck as the elderly polished off fried snacks for dinner. If I gave a Mallu father-in-law bhajiyas for a meal, he’d go nuclear on me. Diabetes! Acidity! Filial brutality! Stuffing my face, I worried about being able to conjure up similar whatnots when the in-laws visited us in Mumbai. Obviously, a square meal just wouldn’t do.

Then there are the specific food-group-related hysterias. Featuring — in our case — rice and proteins. We Mallus like our proteins caught, killed, cooked in kilos of cokennut and served with red rice. To most Gujjus, proteins = dals, which are eaten with rotlis, and not with rice (simply too starchy, no? Not healthy - say the people who mainline deep-frieds).

We found all of it hilarious — till baby arrived. Then the battles-lines were drawn. Rice versus wheat. Oil baths versus just baths. Ragi versus rava. Dal-paani versus rice-kanji. Green bananas versus yellow bananas. Picking-a-name-off-the-top-of-your-head versus naming by rashi. Rubbing a stick made of scented herbs with a bit of gold inside it and giving the baby a drop of the paste (Mallu colic cure) versus fainting at the suggestion (Gujju reaction).

And food-group hysteria again. My mother-in-law implored, ‘Dal is the best protein, no need for non-veg!' And then, seeing I was determined to raise an omnivore, the poor lady got to her specific fear. 'At least don’t give her pig-meat!’ My mother, meanwhile, felt duty bound to enquire, ‘Why haven’t you started fish-chicken for this child still?’ Meanwhile, the fruit of my womb calmly refused Mallu staples like chicken, fish, steamed yellow bananas, jackfruit and rice kanji. She seemed predisposed to sev-gaanthiya, pasta, paneer, pijja, noodles, and still needs her daily Gujju staple: dal-bhaat-shaak-rotli.

Growing older makes you hanker for the ways of your childhood. It makes you want to reclaim some of the past, by teaching your kids things you picked up unconsciously from your parents. I sometimes imagine a family where everybody drinks warm jeera-water and enjoys dried-fish pickle. My husband probably dreams of a home where chhunda is made in summer and methi theplas are made in winter. However, despite our occasional longings for the familiar, it is with the unknown, the different, that we are charting a course. It’s a bit rocky, but it’s fun too.

Our mixed-up ‘Gujyalee’ or ‘Mallurati’ kid will, hopefully, find her own path through the minefield of her parents’ combined nostalgia. If she ever marries, though, I hope she goes all out on a limb. Brings home a son-in-law who grew up eating boiled whale blubber or pickled goat intestines.

The more different the better, I say.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, May 15, 2011

Drop me a Postcard!

Described as the Best British Children’s Literature Blog by the School Library Journal, a pre-eminent online magazine for American Libraries, Playingbythebook.net is written by Zoe Toft. The 37-year-old mother from the UK is a trained linguist and a self-confessed lover of dictionaries. She reviews picture books with her children, and, interestingly, builds each review around an activity inspired by the book. For instance, when Toft reviewed my book, Nonie’s Magic Quilt, she merged it with a description of making a quilt for her daughter.

In 2010, Toft had an unusual idea. “We love receiving ‘proper’ mail, and wanted to participate in an online postcard swap,” she says. “There were many swaps, but none that the kids could enjoy. So I thought up a swap where every postcard would include a children’s book recommendation, because sharing a favourite book is a concrete way of making a connection. I hope to hold the swap every year. I don’t want to make the world any smaller, but I think it’s important we feel connected to each other.”

The swap is structured so that each family sends postcards to five families across the world. In turn, they receive postcards from five different families (not the same ones that they sent postcards to). The postcard can be printed or drawn, with a note recommending a favourite book. Effectively, the families find a window into each other’s lives, and share about 10 book suggestions among them. Toft says, “You can suggest the same book to all the families or – ideally – a different book to each. People often tailor their suggestions keeping in mind the recipient’s age.”

Toft’s first postcard swap in 2010 brought together over 250 families from far-flung places: Alaska, Argentina, Brunei, Bulgaria, Israel, Marshall Islands, Pakistan and Poland. “The toughest part is pairing up people, making sure everyone receives families from five different countries, with children of similar ages. The reward is hearing about the little connections they make. People who come back every year will be paired with different families.” After the 2010 swap, many families went on to become penpals.

During the swap, Toft “met” many people, including Sandhya L., a Bangalore-based writer for Saffrontree.org. Sandhya’s family sent cards to the UK, US, Singapore and Spain. Her daughter “was delighted to receive letters addressed to her. One came from the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean! In these days of instant communication, it was exciting to get post.”

Another new friend was homeschooling mom Bronwyn Lavery of Christchurch, New Zealand. Lavery says, “I set up a world map, marking the locations of families we connected with. I told my kids about the great distance each card would travel. We loved sharing our favourite books and searched for books that others recommended.”

And connections had indeed been made. When Christchurch had a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in April 2011, Toft got in touch with Lavery and heard that many families had lost their homes. Together, they paired families around the world with those in Christchurch, and, “Thanks to the kindness of strangers, we sent 565 books into welfare centres and care packages as well, so that the families would have something to enjoy as they rebuilt their lives.”

Click here to find out more about the International Postcard Swap for Families. Or email zoe.toft@kuvik.net. The last date to register is May 17.

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Mint of Friday, May 6, 2011, to see it on the page, click here: http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/05220037/Drop-me-a-postcard.html?h=C

Art, within and without lines

In the long-forgotten past, I worked in a publishing house. With actual adults, politics, a cafeteria, and real gossip. But before I start weeping at those fond memories, let me move on to the one that inspired this article. Colouring books. Full of perfect, pre-drawn pictures, colouring books were our main money-spinners, and their status as such was sacrosanct.

Once, feeling a bit wild — or unwell maybe — I suggested doing an open-ended sort of art-and-activity book for children. Not the kind where the kid colours a smiling mouse, but one where she is encouraged to apply her mind as well. So you have, say, a tiger with a thought bubble, and the child has to figure out — and doodle — what the tiger might want to eat. Shooting Nazar-suraksha-kavach-type rays of condescension my way, the boss said, ‘Why parents buy activity and colouring books? So that children will do timepass. Not so that children will ask them what to draw.’ Point noted. I shut my gob.

Ten years later, working with kids has shown me that art can and should be seen only as a method of self-expression in children. Any adult intervention should be at the level of acting as a facilitator or trigger — and nothing more. To take joy in colours and explore materials should be the primary focus, rather than acquiring the ‘skills’ associated with making perfect pictures. Skill-based art classes — madly popular right now — teach kids 4 to 6-years-old how to draw and colour ‘well’. They come out making pretty pictures no doubt, but their natural and delightful uninhibitedness is pretty much ironed out of them.
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Try saying the words ‘colouring books’ to my otherwise mild-mannered-artist husband, and he will break into a taandav and rip your head off. These seemingly-innocent books — or the spawn of Satan as he calls them — meet two key parental desires: perfection in the child’s ‘performance’, and secondly, quiet engagement, or ‘timepass’. Like the classes, they leave no room for open-endedness, imagination and self-expression. They also pass on a subtle signal to kids: drawing is grown-up’s work, and should not be attempted by you. You just colour. Neatly and within the lines.

So as a toddler, our kid was only given paper, paints, water and brushes. She messed around like Jackson Pollock on steroids. Skills, her father said, could be taught later. We were entirely smug about this till she returned bawling one day from pre-school. Colouring a printed picture within the lines had her flummoxed. Given colours and paper, she scribbled, rubbed, crushed, had fun. Unlike most kids in her class, she had never seen a colouring book and didn’t know that you couldn’t — at 4 — let your crayons stray.

It took a long time for that particular penny to drop. Colouring within the lines may be an artistically pointless pursuit, but to educationists, colouring with fat crayons is a good way to teach children better finger-control. Sighing at our over-reaction, we quietly went out and bought colouring books. Gradually — with her kind teacher’s help — our child ‘caught up’ with her friends. Humble pie is delicious when the alternative is a teary child.

Now that she’s older, like others her age she draws stuff and builds stories around it. Silly, strange vignettes that probably pop into the head as the hands move (and her artistic tantrums are part of the package too, her friends’ mothers tell me). We’ve also discovered the Japanese artist Taro Gomi’s delightful doodling books. Open-ended and thought-provoking, they don’t just make time pass, they make it fly like Rajnikant on 3G.

It’s cruelly ironic that though we don’t send her to art tuitions, she shamelessly picks up colouring tips like ‘shading’ from the art-tuition-going-kids at school. As an adult she’ll probably write about her kanjoos, oppressive parents who wouldn’t send her to art class at 4 and how deprived she felt about it.

Too bad. We’ll survive that, I hope!

(this article first appeared in the DNA of April 17, 2011)

Passing on the book bug

When I tell people that I write children’s books they usually imagine that I am:
1.As rich as Croesus from all the royalties my kindly publishers send me.

2.If not, then at least as rich as J K Rowling. I mean, at least.

3.If not rich, then surely living in a world full of sweet peppermint twists, where unicorns of joy regularly gambol at my feet.
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It’s fun to disabuse people of these charming notions.

They blanch on hearing about some of the ogres in publishing, and when I tell the average Shining Indian Yuppie how much children’s writing actually pays, the silence is deafening.

There’s a fourth notion that some people — mostly mums with streaked hair and big bags — have about people who write books for children. This is the one where they imagine that writers must know enough practical magic to be able to whiz a video-game-and-mall-obsessed child into an avid reader — overnight, at the age of say 9 or 10 years. Easily done, no? Well, er, no.

When parents tell me ‘My kid doesn’t read, what to do?’ I usually ask them if they read. Some laugh out aloud at the quaint notion of themselves as readers, while others look thoughtful and ask if I meant Chicken Soup for the Parent’s Soul. When I say ‘No,’ they reply cheerfully, ‘Then no, I don’t read. But I’d reeeallly like my kid to read!’

So I explain that to inspire their kids to read, they need to get excited about reading themselves. They look shattered. Obviously I should have said something sensible like ‘Soak three newspapers overnight, blend and pour into a purple glass and then pour into your child’s mouth while holding his nose shut and praying to the sun. You can be sure that he will begin reading on the sixth day!’

Unfortunately, human beings are essentially apes, and we learn by imitation. Little apes watch grown-up apes to figure out what is edible and what is not, what is to be loved and what is not. So if parents value shopping, video games and trips to the mall above all other activities, chances are their kids will too. If parents love football and hiking, chances are their kids will too. And typically, if parents read, chances are, their kids will read too.

I personally worry that reading too much makes kids introverted. Sometimes I feel it lets them get their life-experiences second-hand. But that’s probably because my kid reads. I would rather she were sporty and physical, but she has grown up watching her mother read while lounging around, cooking, eating, and even while trying to fall asleep. Father is same-to-same, with the added feature that he also reads on the pot. It would be pointless for me to despair at the fact that she doesn’t run or swim fantastically well, and regards the act of climbing trees with suspicion. But she reads everything, everywhere — all sorts of books, in the car and on the pot. Apples have this nasty habit of falling close to their trees.

So yes, mums-and-dads, the only thing that will get your kid excited about books is you getting excited about them. If you don’t read but genuinely want your kid to, here are some suggestions: buy interesting, age-appropriate books, and read them out to your child. If he or she is too young to get the ‘reading’, then tell the tale. Dramatically, with a sense of fun. While keeping a watch out for signs of engagement and/or boredom. Talk about books, spend money on buying them (yes, that is key) — you could, like us, also trawl through secondhand stores. While your jaw might lock with boredom, chances are your kid might get into a reading habit.

And who knows, maybe it’ll make a happy reader out of you too!

(this article first appeared in the DNA of Mar 27, 2011)

Pressure-Cooked Kids

Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which I reviewed for the DNA some weeks back, is causing a sharp intake of breath among educationists everywhere. The book is about her life as a hysterical over-ambitious parent, and what disturbed me, personally, is that she is not the only one out there.

Whether it’s Ms Chua in America, or Mrs Rao in Matunga, pushing kids to ‘reach their potential’ begins much earlier these days. Moms I meet at school look at me like I just crawled in from under a particularly grimy rock when I tell them that my 6-year-old has only just begun to learn basketball and music. I can see their antennae quivering: Neglectful Mom Alert!

One lady has been ‘showing’ her kid books of maths tables from the time he was 3; put him in Abacus classes by 4; ‘piano’ or keyboard classes (yes, it’s not just the humble ‘Casio’ anymore) by 4.5; and of course, chess by 5. Another, the mom of a 7-year-old musically gifted child, takes him for Hindustani, Carnatic, and ‘piano’ classes on alternative days, after he’s done seven hours at school. Being excessively liberal, she says, ‘If he finds it too much, I have told him to tell me.’ Yeah, right. See, kids live to please the adults in their lives. Practically everything is acceptable because they don’t know of alternatives. That’s why we, as parents, need to calm the heck down.

Among the favoured classes these days are ‘phonetics’ (doesn’t matter that the term is wrongly used), grammar, tuition, dance, music, Abacus, Vedic Maths, story-telling, creativity, taekwondo and chess. Having shoved their clueless kids into strangers’ homes, mummies enjoy a bit of that precious commodity – free time. And they’ve earned it by paying to have their kids ‘build their potential’ and ‘increase their confidence’, no? It doesn’t matter that being pressurized to do too much early in life can actually lead to anxiety and diffidence in kids.

Increasingly, psychologists tell us that unstructured time – when children hang about with friends or figure out ways to engage themselves – is important. Between school hours and various classes, what about this generation’s unstructured time? Most of us grew up with time which we were allowed to cheerfully waste. Turns out, that ‘wasted’ time – when we could do what we liked – is actually an important tool to de-stress and to build creativity.

The real risk with parents who ‘work so hard’ is that they start expecting rewards. If Aryaman doesn’t make the building aunties swoon at a ‘society function’, then why did we send him to all those Hindustani Music classes, yaar? And if he does sweep ’em off their feet, then, you know, how about Indian Idol next? Alarmingly, The Guardian’s Terri Apter notes that over-parented kids often grow up to be ‘compliant and devious’, ‘obsessed with grades and lacking interest in their subjects’.

Every generation gets the sort of writing on education which reflects its beliefs and aspirations. In the last century Maria Montessori, Rabindranath Tagore, Waldorf Steiner, Aurobindo, Gijubhai Badheka and others propagated a humanistic, benevolent approach to learning. The 70s had John Holt, who advocated homeschooling. It would be truly sad but telling if Amy Chua – who slaps and stresses-out her kids – were to write our generation’s educational classic!

A longer and duller version of this article appeared in the DNA of Sunday Mar 6. They printed an earlier version by mistake :( and they also used a different title!

Bookstores by the Bay

Cities–like the people in them–do not live by bread alone. They need mind and soul food to grow into the vibrant entities that they become. Mumbai has been given its mind food–in the form of stories, novels, pamphlets, athletic rule books, comics and other literary whatnots–by a small band of dedicated bookshops which have been around for 50 years and more. Growing organically with the city, these bookshops have seen it all, and with time, become landmarks in themselves.

A corner of the world
The wonderful, timeless Smoker’s Corner is cleverly laid out in the foyer of Botawala Mansion just outside Ballard Estate, the city’s heritage business district. Suleiman Botawala (76) says, “I bought Smoker’s in 1959 from the original British owners who sold tobacco. Since I loved reading, I slowly changed to books. In those days, P M Road was a two-way street, and it was washed clean regularly.”
There is a clean-cut, spare sort of elegance to the shop, with the display arranged neatly in shelves of lovely, rich teak. A piece of string holds the flap of each book shut – to prevent the covers from getting dog-eared, Botawala explains.

Where are his rarest books, I ask. “All in my house!” he replies with a chuckle. “The moment I spot a rare or unique book, I hold on to it till a customer comes and asks for it. Then I usually gift it to them.” Gift it? Whatever happened to the economics of book selling?
“I’ve sold a lot, and besides, sharing books is the greatest joy in life. Here I’ve met some of the most interesting people in the city and I’ve learned so much from each of them. This is my way of giving back something.” One of his customers in the ’80s, a learned, unassuming man, turned out to be Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He was then the Governor of the nearby Reserve Bank of India.
Botawala is never in your face, making it a policy ‘not to interfere’ with customers. However, he also knows his regulars’ tastes, and always has a treat saved for them. Knowing my fondness for obscure Russian children’s books, he gets me a stack of his oldest.
Botawala is genuinely delighted by the new books stores. “They will surely click, because reading is popular once again. Only their prices are forbidding.”
He shows me a thick, aged book of quotations called Noble Thoughts in Noble Languages and smiles, “New shops may have a mind-boggling range of best-sellers, but they don’t have real treasures like these!” [Mr Botawala passed away in 2009. His son Zubair now manages the shop.]

Where the price is always right
Just further down the road from Smoker’s, is Strand Book Stall, another treasure-trove. Here they pride themselves on their consistently low pricing. “We keep the thinnest of margins,” says P M Shenvi (60), the ever-smiling manager. “That’s how we sell many books at less than half their prices, and give 20% off on others. Our aim is to be affordable and we curtail all other expenses towards that. No fancy décor for us!” Despite that, Strand’s book-lined walls have a distinctive ambience. It’s a combination of courtesy, efficiency and the lingering smell of new books.
Strand’s founder, T N Shanbag [who passed away in February 2009], was perhaps the only bookseller to have won a UNESCO award and a Padmashri. “As a young graduate,” Shenvi recounts, “Shanbag was once asked to stop browsing in a bookshop and leave unless he bought something. He dreamt of setting up a bookshop someday that would keep its doors open to browsers – even those without the money to buy.”
Shanbag eventually set up a bookstall with a capital of Rs 450/- in 1948. He rented a small space inside Strand Cinema with the permission of K K Modi, its owner. Shenvi adds, “Later in 1954 we moved here, thanks in part to Justice M C Chagla’s help.” The roster of Strand’s patrons includes names like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sir Ambalal Sarabhai, R K Narayan, Graham Greene, J R D Tata and Nani Palkiwala.
Things have changed with time. “Before, people preferred classics, but now management and self-help books are popular… And back then, our biggest landmarks were Flora Fountain, Handloom House and Khadi Gramudyog,” Shenvi observes.
Does he consider the new chain bookshops competition? “They are good, but you find the same stocks everywhere. I feel that we are really different. Our interest lies more in encouraging reading, in promoting books.”
And as someone who has spent hours browsing at Strand without buying anything at all, I can certainly vouch for that!

Up next, some sporting action
Mumbai is also home to one of the three bookshops in the world that are exclusively devoted to books on sports. Marine Sports, currently located in Dadar, was started on Marine Drive in 1946 by Bruno Braganza. His son Theo Braganza (58) says, “Dad sold sporting goods, but found the cut-throat competition too much.”
So how did the idea for the switch come up? “He used to love reading, and used to go to sports meets. There he found a demand for rule books, and began importing them. By 1956 we had shifted to Dadar and converted to exclusively selling books on sports. Dadar was something of a cricket hub then,” says the genial Braganza.
Though he was trained to be an engineer, Braganza joined Marine Sports in 1972, when his father grew unwell. He also did a course in publishing, combining his interests in books and sports. “Cricketers and other sportsmen have always come to Marine... Gavaskar was a regular. Before any match he would read up on his opponents. Once, before leaving for Australia, he asked me for a book which was sold out. Dad refused to order just one copy. But I insisted because I felt it would make a positive contribution to Gavaskar’s growth. That’s when I realized that what we were really more than just another business.”
And Marine Sports had indeed created mindspace for a whole generation of sports fans, players, young journalists and officials. Braganza says, “Till the ’80s, sports lovers used to buy all kinds of sports books. But after that, with the rising prices, they became selective.” Currently, Braganza reprints and distributes books to institutes and dealers; and buys and sells rare sports books.
What does Braganza miss about the old Mumbai? “Every weekend, Kalbadevi used to have a sprawling book market. We should to revive it, because there is enough interest. If it can happen in Daryaganj in Delhi, then why not here?”
Why not, indeed. Anyone listening?

The grand-daddy of them all
For sheer age and volume of books though, there’s nothing quite like the New and Second Hand Book Store. Shelves and racks in the medium-sized shop are lined with obscure, fascinating old books. Firoze Vishram (65), the owner Sultan Vishram’s brother, takes out a meticulously-written list of their really rare books. A 1711 edition of The Lucubrations by Sir Isaac Bickerstaff is the oldest.
Outside the shop is a wall display of old books for 10/- and 20/-. You’re sure to find a gem or two here. “People sometimes tell us that we sell our books too cheap,” says Vishram. “But we are not interested in huge profits. We buy low and sell low. My grandfather Jamalbhai Rattansey began this business in 1905. He bought books by weight and sold them very cheap. One client, Magistrate Oscar Brown, would sift through the books and correct the pricing, suggesting that some were worth more.”
Currently, the shop is owned by Rattansey’s grandson Sultan Vishram (67). But over the years, the one constant in the shop has been Chandrakant Mankame, its manager of 60 years. Retired now, Vishram recommends that I meet him.
At 75, Mankame is energetic and alert. “I joined the shop as a cleaner in 1944, when my father died. I was 9. One day when the salesman was absent I helped a customer find a book. The owner spotted my interest in books, and encouraged me. Later he put me in charge. I took the responsibility very seriously till I retired in 2005.”
Mankame also developed an eye for rare books. “I felt that books spoke to me when I opened them. I bought up people’s old collections till the walls were completely filled. My guides were people like H S Mardhani (one of the previous owners) and Arun Tikekar.”
Even as we talk, a lady walks in asking for an old book. She has heard that any book in the world can be found here. It’s a formidable reputation to have. Not for nothing, I guess, have Rajneesh, V K Krishna Menon, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Ali Yavar Jang all stopped to browse here.


This was written in Dec 2007 for the Mumbai International Airport’s magazine. Coordinated by Bijal at the Paprika Media Team. The New and Secondhand Bookshop has just shut down. Putting this piece here in memory…

A Tigress for a Mother...

It’s probably the toughest job in the world, but there’s no training for it. There are no degrees you can get, or papers you could write before they feel you can come on board. Seriously, all it takes to become a parent is the correct set of anatomical parts and a functioning hormonal make-up. And the ‘job’ in concern is a small human being who you have to care for and nurture for the next 20 years. That bit in italics is the scariest thing about parenting.

All you bring to the table, really, are your own emotional baggage and your set of highly idiosyncratic notions on what sort of person your kid should grow up to be. Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother is Amy Chua’s description of how she raised her children, bringing her own unique and mildly demented ideas to the process — often, in the face of her American husband Jed Rubenfeld’s quiet anger and disapproval.

A daughter of Chinese immigrants, a professor of law at Yale, and a renowned writer on ethnicity and foreign affairs, Chua is the epitome of the successful, driven, Asian mom. Brought up in the hard, Chinese way, she is determined not to raise her child like Western parents do — with kindness, quick appreciation and indulgence. Much that she sees wrong in the people around her — neuroses, dysfunctional families, entitled kids with no drive or ambition — she attributes to the Western model of parenting, where parents readily accept their children’s under-achievement and laziness. Western parents let children enjoy their childhood; but Chinese parents, she says, prepare children for the future.

She opts to be a ‘Chinese Mother’, which she explains early on, is not a racial identity but a personality type. ‘Chinese Mothers’ are parents who are ambitious for their children and will steamroll their kids’ immediate desires to ensure their future success. Nothing is fun, she says, till you master it. It’s not enough to be ‘good’ at an instrument; you have to be playing at the Carnegie Hall or performing for international audiences to be acceptable.

Chua’s non-acceptance of mediocrity is across-the-board. She rejects the sloppy birthday cards her kids make her because — with her Confucian wisdom — she knows they can do better. The speeches they write for the funeral of their dead paternal grandmother are moving, simply because Chua wouldn’t accept their first ‘Hallmark-card-type’ efforts. Every success is a direct result of her slave-driving.

In Chua’s view, being a hard-to-please parent will ensure that you raise obedient, devoted, focussed kids who excel at classical music, never become neurotic, and best of all, will look after you in your dotage. Well, her older daughter is just 15 or 16 years old, so let’s not start setting off the fireworks of success yet. Will there be a Guess How My Tiger Mother Scarred Me by one of her kids in the future? Let’s wait and see.

Battle Hymn… is engaging because it makes you cringe and laugh at the same time. Chua’s determination to make a genius out of the family’s dog is funny, while her daughter’s stress-induced biting of the piano’s legs, is not. Working within the cruel-to-be-kind school of parenting, she admits that reprimanding her kids is exhausting, heart-wrenching work. So slapping her daughter in Barcelona — for not kicking her fingers high enough while playing the piano — is the price she pays for giving the child the opportunity to play for an audience ‘in a glass-windowed room, overlooking the Mediterranean’. That she shares these instances in horrifyingly naked detail, is chilling.

Each time Chua goads one of her kids into a stellar public performance, she rests and gloats for a brief moment — usually in the last four lines of the chapter. Then it’s back to nagging them on to another euphoric accolade-drawing effort. Just as this starts getting dull, Battle Hymn… takes a turn for, I’m tempted to say, the human. Her sister’s grave illness becomes a pivot for the story. It is followed by a meltdown of sorts, which brings her the realisation that the Chinese Mother must transmogrify into what she really is — a Western parent. Ironically, the advice that prods her into doing so comes from her mother who raised her the hard, Chinese way.

Battle Hymn… is about choices we make — for ourselves and our children. It is a frightening book in parts, and in others, it nudges us to question our own assumptions. Watching her point out the obvious failures of Western parenting is interesting. But then, just reading about Chua’s horrible excesses — throwing a three-year-old out into the winter evening because she refuses to play one note on the piano — is enough to stamp out all admiration. It makes you want to have her certified.

What works for the book is the close-to-the-bones feeling that Chua brings to her words. She pulls no punches. When her relationship with her second daughter sours, her descriptions of their encounters are as graphic as her writing on her ‘triumphs’. The book is destined to become a bestseller in the chick-lit-for-grown-ups genre. It has that crucial mix of ingredients: clever, glib writing; humour; pretty, successful people with tiny, self-created problems; and a dramatic twist where the angry maverick turns back to the fold of the Western way. All one hopes for is that the book doesn’t become a self-help-type bestseller, with mothers being inspired by its methods.

Now that would be truly scary.

This book review first appeared in the DNA of Feb 6, 2011 with a different title.

No shame or what?

An old friend from Delhi visited us recently — a really great guy who is stylish in the way that only men from Delhi can be. One evening, I asked him to carry a perfectly good, purple coloured, non-crackly (crucial details) plastic bag. Nothing prepared me for his shocked yelp. “A plastic bag you want me to hold? It crackles and it’s pink! No way! It just won’t go with me.” He shuddered.

I took it back, muttering something like, “Wait-till-you-have-a-kid-bugger.” See, the last six years have changed us. Pista-green candy-striped cloth bags, ugly red-and-yellow umbrellas, Tinkerbell raincoats, sky-blue potty seats and the like have been lugged by us.We have, in many ways, lost our sense of style — and, truly, lost our sense of shame too.

I blame it all on the process of becoming parents. The loss of one’s coolth begins with the woman getting pregnant. As a guy, once your woman’s bump starts to show, and there’s that civilised and public acknowledgement of your sex life by neighbours and parents, you change in crucial ways. Don’t ask me how or why, but it happens. I had fertility issues at one point, and I remember the doctor — a respectable, middle-aged, mom-type — asking us to ‘have relations as many times as possible’ on a particular date. I stared at her for five whole seconds, eyes narrowed, wondering what she was saying. And suddenly I realised that she was asking us to have sex. When we recovered from the acute nails-on-the-wall-feeling induced by her euphemism, we knew that nothing would be the same any more; least of all, the act itself.

As for women — do I really need to elaborate? Somehow, having a child is equivalent to being in a reality show inside a goldfish bowl. Because once you’re pregnant, the human race at large suddenly begins to take an active interest in you. This is probably an atavistic thing, dating back to centuries of being concerned about she-who-bears-life. Apart from being prodded by the doctor and his/her team, the world and its cousin will advise you. The best nugget I got was a vital tip on human anatomy from an elderly Punjabi uncle on my morning walks. He recommended that I eat the ghee-rich ‘panjeeri,’ which would ‘make the insides smooth’ so that the baby ‘comes out easily’. Between incomprehension and shock, there is a small space called parenthood.

Inevitably and slowly, you will relax into the state, wantonly discussing vomiting, acidity and bowel movements with strangers.

I remember that my salwar’s naada used to keep slipping down the parabola of my belly, and I would keep hitching it up. Pull up that naada in full public view often enough and you realise that dignity-wise, it’s all south from here. (Why did I continue wearing falling-naada salwars? Because this was deep, dark 2003, when only aerobics instructors and male dancers wore tights.

Respectable pregnant women were either looking like ducks in frocks, or seahorses in saris, or were wearing ‘punjabi dresses’.)
Once you have the baby, the change is irreversible. You talk about food, poop, milk and breast pumps with a quiet insouciance. You used to be angsty, reserved, cool people. Now you’re loud, hustling parents, who have no qualms asking stern pediatricians daft questions, or doling out free advice to pregnant women and new moms. Yeah, and you stop being so darn particular about things like bags.

Between losing her senses of style, shame and sanity, Anita Vachharajani raises a child and writes children’s books

This article appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Jan 30, 2011

So, you work from home?

No, frankly, I just pretend to. Really, all I do is answer the doorbell. Answer the doorbell to the cook, who, being trained in the offense-is-the-best-defense school of culinary arts, blasts me immediately for the lack of key ingredients.

Then I answer the doorbell to various couriers — for me, for husband, for neighbour and neighbour’s relative. Answer the doorbell to someone who wants to sell me multiplex coupons. Followed by someone, allegedly from the electric board, who wants to sell me an appliance which will halve my power bills. When the Art of Living guys ring, promising to bring calm into my life, I start foaming at the mouth.

Finally, I plop down on my ‘office’ — the divan in the hall, a parking zone for crayons, earrings, kid’s underpants, notebooks and novels, left-over food and teacups. When you work from home, ‘official’ space and time are ill-defined. Inexplicably, you end up working longer hours and getting paid less.

For instance, while reviewing a long, serious book recently, I carefully wrote on notelets and stuck them in. I normally find sticky notes too wasteful, but this lot were an irresistible leaf-green and plum in colour (in a freelancer’s lonely life, things like nice stationery matter). So I really couldn’t blame my daughter when she opened the book which was lying around and spent a blissful 15 minutes taking out each note, admiring it, and using it to form a long green-and-plum snake. I mean, she’s six. She doesn’t recognise boundaries which are not physical. Colours are irresistible to her. Deep sigh. That’s four hours of my life I’m never getting back, and one needlessly late night to make good.

While working from home, your time is pretty much cut up and tossed all over the place like dhania in the bhel puri. It’s not fair on the kid either, because to a small child it’s inexplicable that mom/dad can be home, but not be available. Nothing says ‘I’m here, but just not for you’ better than looking into a laptop and typing busily while your child is saying something.

I should know — I’ve done it often enough. After six years of accepting my distracted parenting, my daughter finally said the other day, “You don’t spend time with me.” I started to protest and tell her about the hours I have spent shoveling food into her mouth. With the wisdom of her kind, she cut in, “And feeding me lunch is not spending time with me, ok?” For the record, if I didn’t have a chronic health problem, I’d be out there running for the VT fast every single day.

Because kids are small animals, they know it when you’re with them 100% and when you’re somewhere else in your head. When office-going parents come home tired, children, worshipful and huggy, are like balm to their weary souls. To us work-from-home types, kids are just another kind of doorbell. Cute, but still very much in the way.

Eight years back I read that Enid Blyton’s younger daughter had had an unhappy childhood because, apparently, Ma Blyton was more than a little neglectful of her own offspring. She was entirely focussed on creating magic for other people’s kids and on what we would today call ‘building her brand’. Then, my lips had curled in disgust at her cruelty. Now — except for the talent, the success and the wealth — I’ve begun to remind me just a little bit of her.

Between cooks, doorbells and courier deliveries, Anita Vachharajani tries to write children's books

This article appeared in the DNA of Oct 24, 2010

In which, a lot was seen!

Just back from a holiday in Tamil Nadu. For a spell that was so hopelessly mis-planned and unplanned, I must say it ended up being great fun. Since Amit – calm, efficient, centred – is the producer and general go-to-guy for so many international crews shooting documentaries all over India, it’s logical that the one who plans and executes the family holidays should be me. The paranoid and anxious half.

This trip to TN, started, for some reason, by falling between the stools. I had thought we were on the right track - two days each in Mahabalipuram, Pondicherry, Auroville. Spaced out so my back wouldn’t give way. But then I got dire warnings – of major BOREDOM, among other things! Fearfully we went, and, as it turned out - thanks to serendipity and human kindness - we had a blast in every way, especially the visual.

Not only did we enjoy Pondi and Auroville, we met some lovely people in these places too. The highlights of the trip were the monoliths of Mahabs (for me the Mahishasuramardini cave which I walked in alone and the bizarrely wonderful sculpture college); Auroville and the Gump-a-lump Xmas party; and finally, the heritage walk with Ashok Panda of Intach, Pondicherry (later, getting gloriously lost in the Tamil Quarter, finding Choco-la, eating their rum choc and getting high under a hot TN sun), and later still, with exceptional luck, being allowed into Ananda Rangapillai’s house by his kind family.

A lot of what we saw and delighted in on this trip – the rock-cut caves in Mahabs, the street sellers sculpting little stone lockets and statues, the whole of the man-made forest in Auroville, the crocheted shoes they make, the cookies they bake, the houses and streets in Pondi, the plaster cast angels and Santas sold outside Samba Kovil, the beautiful beadwork done on Ravi Varma’s lithos by Ananda Ranga's great-grand-daughter-in-law – was about craft in one form or the other.
But the artist we engaged with the most was Saraswati, a ceramic miniaturist, who lives and works in Dana, the pottery community in Auroville. I’ve long liked Auroville’s tradition of contemporary pottery – as seen thru their mugs and cups and plates. Very beautiful, in a remote, still, cool, forest-glade sort of way.

So nothing prepared us for the liveliness of Saraswati’s creations. For its sheer lightness of being. Apart from coffee and some lovely dark chocolate, we were invited to wade through her studio housed in a two-storey house in the middle of the seriously wooded Dana. The studio was colourful, and everything there was small, even the impossibly flat tree frog that leapt across their painted walls. Amit went mad with the photos.
Saraswati’s work is busy, tiny, textured, and totally inventive. Like something out in a story-book-world full of whimsy. Since her pieces are mostly profusely populated miniatures, Saraswati prefers to work with white body clay, which is flexible and thin enough to make what she calls “small and smaller details”.
We can’t help but comment on her unusual colours and how they make the figures look delicate and other-worldly. Turns out that she uses commercial glazes from Russia. “I have got used to them since 20 years, and it’s difficult to break the habit of having really bright and translucent colours,” she qualifies.
Saraswati first heard about Auroville at 15 years. “Since then my mother had dreamt of coming here. It became possible only in 1998, when our country became more open and overcame the main post-Soviet economical crisis. But the final decision of staying here, I took in 2004.” Apart from working in her own studio called Have Fun Pottery, she also teaches at the White Peacock Center for Clay Education with her mother, a teacher and a ceramist.
The house she lives in is greener, wilder than most parts of Auroville that we have walked through (which is, admittedly, not much at all). The tree frogs, the grasses, the flying insects – you feel that it all sort of comes together and resonates through her work, in the many little creatures that she makes to populate her art. “If I were to put it in a hierarchy of values,” she replies, “I would put living in Auroville as a city of dreamers as the most inspiring thing for me. I feel I belong here. Next I would say the green, peaceful surroundings inspire me, and after that, living in Dana. For me it is very important to measure my breath with the rhythm of the big dream of this unique place. I would think that it was a coincidence – a beautiful joke of life – that the Divine put me to live in Dana, where most of the pottery-community live and work.”

There’s a story within each piece that Saraswati crafts, so that you can gaze at it for the longest time. In her kitchen stove series, all of the household’s gustatory needs are found on the stove (including a delicious-loooking fried egg which threatens to ooze off its pan). I loved the earrings and pendants, and her Christmas fridge magnets – a row of snowmen who look like they are in the middle of a good gossip session. Amit’s favourites were, I think, this rather stern, story-book-character looking lady, and this jug which has a world around it.

About her process of creating the pieces, Saraswati says, “Each piece goes through my hands, and this hand-crafting is the longest part of the process. Then it goes through the bisque fire in an electrical furnace for four hours. Then it’s glazed (by brush, all the tiny details are worked on and coloured here), and then it’s finally fired for another six hours. If I am not happy with the result, I may keep adding glazes and firing again till I am satisfied.”

You can see more of Saraswati’s work on her site.

Lost and Found

Lost And Found is a well-intentioned book. It has its heart in the right place. It’s only the mind which has gone for a long, meandering walk. The result is a plot so full of strains, threads and characters, that you stand a risk of losing yourself — and not in a good way either.

Lakshmi is the content writer for a porn website about ‘the sensory adventures of a beautiful, blind girl’ called, not very originally, ‘Kavita’. Years back, after a sexual encounter on a train one night, Lakshmi had become pregnant. Of the twins she delivered, one was abandoned in a temple and the other was given to a stranger in a taxi. One twin, Nirmal, is now a street child/actor, and the other, Salim, is a Pakistani jehadi. He is in Mumbai as a part of the 26/11 terror squad.

Placid Hari Odannur, a freelance journalist, is the one who, Lakshmi insists, forced himself on her 16 years ago. So, in the present, a night before the terror attack, she has kidnapped him and tied him up in her bathroom. The attack is set against this melee, a Cow Sena march, the terrorist-minder’s midlife crisis, newspaper-office politics and a rickshaw driver’s day.

In the hands of a less self-conscious writer, one with more rigour and economy of expression, the story might have crackled surreally. Surendran’s sub-plots, multiple threads, and tendency to tell you too much about every minor character, get tiresome. Sometimes you feel he is trying hard — but failing — to evoke a Llosa, a Marquez, and even, in desperation, a Manmohan Desai. His prose sparkles occasionally, when he manages to restrain himself from saying too much.

The book does have a few truly attractive elements. The fact that Surendran locates the story in the 26/11 attacks, and decides to delve a bit deeper there, to humanise those that the media has demonised entirely, is interesting. You get a definite sense of his engagement with Mumbai, its history, its realities and the way forces of fundamentalism play out here. To be fair, the novel does tighten up around halfway through.

The teeming landscape of Lost And Found is peppered with the implausible — a double-edged sword which perhaps only authors with the right mix of control and madness must play with. Because we have grown up on Manmohan Desai, we will buy the long-lost-brothers thing, and even the madness of the fictive world where the entire ‘family’ comes together in the course of one turbulent night. But even within this fictional universe, it’s hard to believe that Lakshmi, 19, educated and middle-class, would have had to run away to Goa and spend her pregnancy selling trinkets on a beach. Finally, it is the ham-handed treatment, the lack of really nuanced dialogues and situations that fails Lost And Found.

The newspaper’s dynamics are entertaining, but Surendran spends too much time exploring the local colour of the journalist’s world to really plunge deep. Lakshmi and her friend Beverly show little or no character development. Hari, too, though 35, seems implausibly adolescent. The street boy and the rickshaw driver often become clichés. Culpably, the characters often use words that are more the author’s than their own.

Surendran probably set off to create a mad, chaotic, maelstrom of a book. What he has done, though, is write one that has so many layers piled on to it that it sags under the weight of its own cleverness. And somehow, you can’t help but resent the writer for botching up what must have been a remarkable idea to begin with.

(This review appeared in the DNA of Sunday, Dec 26)

Small Blunders - Articles from the DNA Column

It’s hard work being a parent. But you’ve probably heard that one before. What is more intriguing is why people have kids in the first place. All through those nine months of nausea, I kept feeling that motherhood was evolution’s biggest joke on women. I figured the first time round you could get conned into it, but why would you do it a second or a third time?

There is of course a good measure of self-love involved in having a baby. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Look ma, I made a little human and it looks, talks and behaves like me. Also, as humans we love to be needed, and after six to eight months of being needed so viscerally by a small human being, you sort of begin to get off on the feeling. No one else looks at you with such adoration, no one else smiles with such delight when he sees your face (he’s probably thinking of lunch, but we'll let that pass). No one else, frankly, needs you with such abandon and such fury. Parenting can give you a heady sense of power. The nicest parents, I guess, are those who don’t misuse that power.

Though it isn’t apparent at first, this need to be needed contributes to some extent to most parents taking the plunge again. Five years after cribbing about pregnancy, when my child was beginning to become her own person, I was willing to go through all of it again just to have another needy little butterball in my arms. At some level, I’m guessing we're hard-wired to procreate, to make copies of ourselves and fill the planet. We could slow down now, because the planet has more than enough of us. But I guess our psyches haven’t heard the news yet.

Having a child is not just one long ego-massage, though (praise from passing strangers dries up after your kid hits seven). An emotional knuckle-duster waits just around the corner. Forget all the physical effort: the night feeds, the colic, the teething, the falls, the terrible twos, the preschool-admission rush, the homework, the tiffins you’ve packed andthe various illnesses and accidents that will have your kachhas in a twist forever.

That’s the easy part compared to the painful realisation that no matter what you do, no matter which toys you get and what theme parties you throw, one day the apple of your eye will turn into a Cynical Young Person. She will probably gobsmack you when she looks back at all your years as a devoted helicopter parent and smirks: ‘Well, I didn’t ask to be born, did I?’ To kids of a certain age, the only perfect parent is their best friend’s dad or mom. You just about manage not to disgrace yourself by starving her to death or something.

Six years back, between spraying out jets of vomit, I paused to ask my mother why women went through so much physical stress just to have children. Convinced that I was insane, and being the queen of understatement that she is, she shrugged and said, ‘Because when you have a child, time passes.’ It’s been over six years now that I’ve been a parent myself, and with every passing day, I realise that raising a child does play tricks with time.

Moments get stretched into lifetimes, so that you never forget that first smile, that first word, that first step. But days turn into liquid whirlwinds and simply swish by, till, before you know it, the adorable little cuddlebunny is a snarling teen. One more swish and he becomes a parent himself, aware of how much trouble raising a child can be, and finally, finally ready to be grateful for all you did.

Maybe mom was right. Maybe it’s worth it after all!


This article appeared in the DNA on Sunday, Sept 26, 2010
Link here: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/comment_mama-knows-best_1443353

Tales of a City

Most people who live in Mumbai feel a peculiar sort of love for it. Many things are wrong with this dystopian, poorly-planned city, but most of us probably couldn’t bear to live elsewhere. If, like me, you feel this mix of emotions, then you’re going to love Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables.

The book pulls together Mumbai’s many narratives – cinematic, literary, architectural and artistic. It is a tale of the legends, poems, books, novels, mysteries, newspaper articles, film songs, advertisements, architectural styles, comic books, apocryphal stories and paintings inspired by this city. Through them, Prakash is able to distill an imagining of Mumbai that is more real than a straightforward history, simply because it is told by so many different voices.

Mumbai’s story, as it unfolds in Prakash’s narrative, is an absorbing one, with varied sources: newspapers and pamphlets, books, paintings, interviews and songs, lawsuits and art. To each set of texts, Prakash brings his unique eye. With the entertaining Marathi writer Govind Narayan Madgavkar (Mumbaiche Varnan) or the Parsi writer Sir Dinshaw Wacha (Shells from the Sands of Bombay) or the British police commissioner S M Edwardes (ethnographic sketches for The Times of India), Prakash is interested in the visual ‘reading of the city’. To Madgavkar and Wacha, the ‘kaleidoscopic but orderly’ cosmopolitanism of Bombay is riveting. Edwardes is captivated by the colourful, exotic ‘Indian’ life that unfolds just outside of the British quarter. Like his contemporaries, he too is caught up in the ‘image of otherness’ that the city’s sights offer.

There are nuggets aplenty – you’ll never look at art deco or the Marine Drive in the same way again, and suddenly, street names develop a back-story. Some of our wealthiest philanthropists, for instance, were opium traders (like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the Wadias, the Cowasjis and Motichund Aminchund). There were committed professionals as well, like Dr A G Viegas, who diagnosed Bombay’s first case of bubonic plague. Confidence tricks and murder were a Bombay thing back then as well, as seen in Naoroji Dumasia’s crime books – one of which was based on the cases of Sardar Mir Abdul Ali, a real police detective.

The startling thing about Mumbai Fables is its sheer scope. Here you will find the story of the film studios and the secular seeds of the film industry; the rise and fall of the mill politics; the thrilling story of the Nanavati murder case and how the Blitz reported it; and unsettling accounts of the Babri-Masjid riots and the bomb blasts. Hindi film songs and Marathi Dalit poetry feature here, as do Meera Devidayal’s Mumbai-taxi-inspired paintings, the wonderful Hindi comic/graphic novel Doga, cartoons from Marathi newspapers, and the pulsating life and commerce of Dharavi. Like the creators of these texts, Prakash is an outsider and an admirer, but his prose is coloured with a sense of the beauty of this city – of its unique, alluring cosmopolitanism. Reading …Fables, you can understand what it was that drew everyone from the Konkani mill-worker to the Urdu poet here.

Prakash writes of the processes that shaped the city’s geography to accommodate human greed and industrial pressures, often at the cost of common sense. He discusses the various attempts made to ‘plan’ Mumbai, to reclaim land and ‘colonise nature’. Almost all of those attempts were either inspired or marred by greedy collusions between governments and corporates. This greed has overpowered vision, and ‘people’s needs’ have been used as an excuse to grab land or to build haphazardly.

Interestingly, the first people to think of reclaiming land from the sea were the Portuguese, but the process began only when the East India Company took over. Started in 1784, reclamations had, by 1872, added four million square yards to Bombay. Girangaon or the ‘Village of Mills’ sprouted up to meet the international demand for cotton. Unhygienic conditions and a particularly heavy monsoon led to the bubonic plague epidemic of 1896-97. The disregard for public good was of course a sign of colonial times, but seen in today’s context, it seems eerily familiar.

Prakash chronicles all of this with a novel-like quality. He describes the various blunders around the Backbay reclamation project and a campaign against it by the nationalist lawyer Khurshed Framji Nariman (supported by the Bombay Chronicle, which was edited by an anti-colonial Irishman, B G Horniman). Nariman took up cause against the mosquito-breeding ‘grand mess’ that the project had become, was sued by the British government, and went on to completely trounce them. The project was reinstated years later, and, in a terribly ironic gesture, a part of the area was named after him. Prakash details how thoughtful planners like Charles Correa and honest bureaucrats like J B D’Souza have met with similar obstacles later.

Which is not to say that Mumbai Fables does not have its flaws. While the chapter on films is probably the best in the book, the one on Russi Karanjia and the Nanavati case is a bit weak. Also Prakash tends to slip into parenthetical discussions, which make for a turgid read. The book takes time to climb into your head and explode there – the beginning, for instance, is dull, but stick with it, because explode it does!

This is an important book, especially today, when we are in the danger of not just repeating history, but bludgeoning ourselves on the head with it. The city’s loss of open, green spaces, as well as the Mumbai University chancellor’s dismissal of a book based on the demands of a politician’s young son, are indicative of the fact that we need to read this book, to revisit history and learn from it, so that we don’t look like complete fools a hundred years from now.

Mumbai Fables
Gyan Prakash
HarperCollins Publishers India
Rs 599
396 pp

(This was originally written for the Sunday DNA and can be viewed here: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/review_book-review-mumbai-fables_1453744)

kerala kathas

in kerala, chasing the red rain and silent scientists, the male vachharajani tiredly reached trivandrum, where the kind hari, sound recordist, took him to a remaindered books stall, where he found these gems.

pipiou, a french book and disc (a small LP) with really sweet illustrations. it was an advt for green peas, using this fella and a slogan that went: "on a toujours besoin de petits pois chez soi" or in this girl detective's high-school french - one always needs a little peas at home. and please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.
 

A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce, which, according to wikipedia 'follows the story of a boy (13 years old) who visits an unusual family and their home. While spending the day in the Robinson household, Wilbur's best friend joins in the search for Grandfather Robinson's missing false teeth and meets one wacky relative after another'. disney made a film based on it called meet the robinsons

and then the jewel of the lot, richard erdoes's (1912-2008) peddlers and vendors of the world. which is a part of the three-book series that this anthropologist-cum-illustrator (i guess in the pre-internet world, people had the time to explore all of their interests!) had done. the other two are: musicians of the world and (of all things) policemen of the world. it's all very crisp and mid-century modernist + western in style and execution. quite incorrect, but so so so delightful. here are some pics from the books. (for some reason blogger's mangling my captions - so i removed them.)