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M S Sriram: Professor, IIM Ahmedabad

Kannada Author: Has  authored two anthologies of short stories in Kannada

His Blog: joy-of-books.blogspot.com, largely deals with books

 

I have known Reading Rainbow right from its inception when my son Arjun enrolled in the earliest batch. What is amazing about RR is the way Atula weaves the highly personal habit of reading books into a community activity.

We know of book clubs and discussion forums that discuss books in a rather detached and intellectual way. However Reading Rainbow allows you to experience a book not only through the process of reading, but helps kids to live the lives of the characters through the various other activities they undertake in RR - and all of them are woven around books.

Atula once invited me to the centre to interact with the kids and narrate a story. That was when I realized that it is one thing to be a writer for adults, but quite another to get the span of attention of a bunch of enthusiastic kids. None of the stories I wanted to narrate were new - they all knew the folktales, they all knew the usual stories that we narrate from the Panchatantra, the Aesop’s Fables and all the usual authors that we could think of.  It was indeed one of the greatest challenges I faced and I compliment on the team of RR that they make the place so interesting to a bunch of kids whose span of attention could at best be momentary. I think it takes a special skill to deal with kids.

It was not without reason that the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer said the following about why he writes for children in his Nobel Banquet speech: "There are five hundred reasons why I began to write for children, but to save time I will mention only ten of them:

  1. Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.
  2. Children don't read to find their identity.
  3. They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation.
  4. They have no use for psychology.
  5. They detest sociology.
  6. They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegan’s Wake.
  7. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity,        punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.
  8. They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes.
  9. They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.
  10. When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.

Hats off to somebody who could deal with such tough critics on a sustained basis!!