Where The Wild Books Are

Bookaroo, India’s first children’s book festival, proves that there are no book-hating children, only dully told stories, argues PARVATI SHARMA

FOR MITA KAPUR, a coorganiser of Bookaroo, one of the best moments of this first-of-its-kind children’s book festival was watching a mother sitting on the lawns with two children on her lap, reading to them from a book. When she looked again, a few moments later, the mother was surrounded by about 15 children, all wanting to hear the story.

“On a normal weekend”, she says, “they might have been in their own, separate rooms, watching television”.

There was a definite warmth to the event, not least that of the winter sun falling on the friendly green lawns, compact amphitheatres

and gravelly paths of Sanskriti, on the outskirts of Delhi. Children ran around the grounds in between sessions of storytelling, comicsmaking and painting. There was none of the yelling for quiet that often becomes a parent’s public face.

Instead, there were adults rediscovering the pleasures of nonsense verse and fairy tales, and parents eager to keep their children reading. “The look on the parents’ and participants’ faces was a treat”, says Anita Roy, a coorganiser. “They all looked like they were having a good time. I had tiny, sweet little faces coming up to me and saying “Thank you ma’am, thank you aunty; and parents asking ‘Do you do this regularly? I’d like to book my child for next month’.”

Wendy Cooling, a British educationist who works with projects like Booktrust and Bookstart, both aimed at encouraging reading, was approached by parents through the day, seeking advice. One father wanted to know how to get his son to stop watching DVDs all the time. “Sometimes”, said Cooling, “you have to be a bit tricky with kids. What I’d do is, I’d tell him the DVD player had stopped working; now find something else to do”.

In her talk, Cooling spoke of inculcating an ease with language and a sense of its rhythms among very young children. Once, after she’d read The Lady of Shalott to a class of seven-year-olds, a boy said “I could hear the water lapping”. Whether or not the children ‘understood’ the poem is really not the point. “We sell books like green vegetables when we should be selling them like ice-cream”.

Many other authors echoed this view. Parents want their children to read General Knowledge books, teachers want their students to understand the moral of a story — and, unfortunately for both, child critics can be brutal; if they are bored by a ponderous, improving tale, it is soon apparent.

Anushka Ravishankar started writing children’s books when she couldn’t find any for her young daughter. She has since written several books, including beautifully illustrated picture books like To Market To Market. She tells the story of how a fellow traveller on a train looked at her books and could not understand why she wrote them. “We went in circles: he kept asking ‘What’s the point?’ and I kept saying, ‘Well, the point is that there’s no point’ until finally he exclaimed, ‘Now I get it! You get them to enjoy reading so they can start reading real books!”

“You treat stories as trivial — No, no, no”, says the prolific children’s writer Anupa Lal, whose storytelling sessions in Hindi were among the most popular at Bookaroo. “Children are much cleverer than we think.” It’s only if they enjoy the story that they’ll be willing to see any message in it.

And, often enough, no message at all will do. Awardwinning author Paro Anand tells of how she once concluded the first day of a storytelling workshop in Hyderabad with a ghost story. Later, an adult criticised this decision. She told him to return the next day, at the end of which she asked the children how they’d like to end the session. “They all asked for a ghost story!” she said

STILL, IN a world in which, it’s been argued, role-playing games and social networking sites are equipping children with the new kinds of skills they’ll need as adults, what use does reading serve?

“Reading is a friend”, says Padmini Mongia, who has just published Pchak! Pchak!, a picture book, “You can have other friends too but what reading does, in this increasingly cacophonous universe, is develop a relationship with silence.”

A lazy Sunday spent reading is hard to beat for sheer luxury. And perhaps it is the memory of such afternoons that brought parents to the festival in such droves.

As Anoushka Ravishankar says, "I wanted my daughter to read because it’s great fun; I wanted to share that with her"”.