Summer holidays! Time for yet another reading workshop! I’m moving to another library now – Friends Library, Salunke Vihar Road Mark the dates: 19th May – 23rd May 2014 Age-group: 8-12 years Time: 10 am – 11:30 am Registration fee: Rs. 750 Join the fun! Let’s explore the world of stories!
Five Problems with Good Books
1) I forget that I’m a writer. I pick up Harry Potter determined to see how J.K. Rowling weaves the magic she weaves. I decide that I will look at her techniques, the way she gets me involved in the story and how she slides in her humour. Five chapters – that’s all it takes to get me so engrossed […]
Last Day to Vote
Somehow, seeing my book cover on Rivokids’s shortlist for the Parents Kids Choice Awards makes it all the more real. Thank you, those who voted. And thank you, all those who shared the link. Those who didn’t, would you do it now please? Voting closes today!
International Dance Day
It’s International Dance Day! The best day, perhaps, to pay tribute to my guru, Guru Mythili Raghavan. Nobody can quite understand why she means so much to us. Why is it that we spend odd hours at her place? Why do so many of the seniors’ parents comment that we listen more to her than […]
Fun 4 Kids
It’s workshop season! The Cultural Centre, Pune, is a new space in Mundhwa for different activities and programmes. “Fun 4 Kids” is a venture into a range of activities for children. I will be facilitating the ‘Literature’ activities with reading and writing workshops once a month. The poster says it all!
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
“How about watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?” a friend’s mother suggested when I was about eleven. I giggled. “What a funny name! What is that?” “You mean you haven’t read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?” Eyes wide open in amazement. And that is how I came to watch the old BBC movie […]
The Red Dress
As a child, I did not like anything about anything awkward. I did not like dirt (even though I asked my father where the Famous Five went to the loo and how they had baths when they went camping). I did not find ‘dirty’ humour funny, even humour aimed at children. I liked politeness and […]
Hello? Is Anybody There?
If you go to the moon, you would go up. But when you reach the moon, you land. You go down. And if you are on the moon and you look up, you will see the earth. That means that somewhere between here and the moon, up becomes down and down becomes up. I started […]
Shadow Web
Everybody in the internet age does it at least once in a while. Type in ‘Varsha Seshan’, just to see what pops up. Don’t tell me you haven’t searched for yourself on Google. Jessica Allendon did just that. And the consequences were totally out of control. Shadow Web is not about time-travel. Time-travel is easy. […]
Avameru
I began to read the book and licked my lips, wondering what I could say about it. A book by a dear friend can be a dangerous thing because you must have an opinion about it. With Avameru, the opinion was easy. I enjoyed it. Yes, in the beginning, I had thoughts in my head […]
Women of Pride
Women of Pride unravelled a lot of questions before proceeding to respond to them, at least in part . There was so much about the devadasis that I did not know. Often in books I read, the history of these temple dancers was cheerfully summed up in a couple of sentences. The devadasis were nityasumangali […]
International Children’s Book Day
Yes, today is International Children’s Book Day, a time for me to look back at all the wonderful children’s books I’ve read this year!
Toro! Toro!
Is it true that the most moving books must be placed during wartime? How strange that the moments of greatest human kindness come during the cruelest of times! Toro! Toro! is not like the other Morpurgos that I have read, insomuch that it is not about the second world war at all. Yet, it is about […]
The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
The best stories are the simplest ones of all. And who better than Michael Morpurgo to write simple stories so simply that they charm you? Boowie receives a letter from his grandmother, not very long after the death of his grandfather. It is undoubtedly the most remarkable letter of his life. As part of the […]
The Great Escape
The story of two dogs and a cat during the second world war brought to mind an aspect of war that I had never considered. What happened to all the animals, particularly pets, during the war? Startling statistics that Megan Rix has included after the novel reveal that there were far more animals killed during […]
Luck
Why are publishers so diffident about revealing the fact that a collection of short stories is just that – a collection of short stories and not a novel? I started reading Luck by Dhruba Hazarika with the distinct impression that it was a novel. I finished the first ‘chapter’ feeling deeply disturbed. I finished the […]
Twelve Minutes to Midnight
I’m still chuckling as I think about Twelve Minutes to Midnight. It’s been a while since my mind was so absorbed in a book that I kept waiting to get back to it. I even took it with me to the Writers’ Club at St. Mary’s School and pored over it. I felt a little […]
Yellow Shoes
Today is World Storytelling Day. Here is a story to celebrate the day! If you like it, use it. Read it out to children. Make them imagine and colour – spread the joy of storytelling! Alka sat down on the floor to tie her shoelaces. Weekends were fun. She could meet everyone, play […]
Waterslain Angels
When I was about ten, I read British Folk-Tales (not linking this to a place where you can buy it because Amazon is selling it at an incredible price of 11,000 rupees) by Kevin Crossley-Holland and enjoyed it. I had my favourite stories in the collection and I read them over and over again.A few […]
Ace
I always link my book reviews to amazon.in for people to buy the book there, but when I searched for Dick King-Smith’s Ace, the first thing I found was a hardcover priced at ₹12,527.41 + ₹99 delivery charge! I did find a copy that’s cheaper, though, and that’s a mercy; however much I enjoyed the […]