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 Where Every Creature Has a Story What do you think the world of animals looks like? Not merely the one we glimpse through binoculars in forests, but the one they inhabit with their families and friends. In Padmini Mongia's imagination, young dolphins may squirm when their mothers fuss over them, while mice guard their homes as fiercely as children treasure their own rooms.   In I Do So I Do: Stories , she creates a world where the lives of animals, birds, insects and even pests intersect with human lives - a world where Fluffy the cat is a diva and Gugu the giraffe is looked out for by four ‘ias - Kia, Mia, Sia and Tia. Full of wonder and whimsy, I Do So I Do: Stories, is a collection of seven tales, some of which are narrated as bedtime stories to the author's niece.  The tales, which often read like modern fables, take readers from coral reefs in Capri and Cambodia to a desert town in India and a garden where two teeny-weeny cacti are jealous of each other. Not every s...

  A second chance… Two bus hijacks with more or less the same bunch of passengers involved. How will they react? Have the passengers, who are also neighbours, learnt anything from the burden on their conscience from the first episode? Or they care more about their person, to hell with the consequences? Twice in Nalanda may sound like a classic thriller. But it digs deeper, to find out about people’s equation with death. The choices they make when a pistol is pointed at their temple by the hijacker or the thoughts they harbour about bumping off their neighbour. Twice in Nalanda talks about the journey that residents of Nalanda housing society undertake every day, in a cream and red minibus, to their workplace in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The journey is omniscient narrator here. It not only details the daily drudge of the commute, but about the transformative passage that the residents of Nalanda undergo within the timespan of the two incidents - November 1998 and November 2024. ...

Caw...caw! All set for your holiday in forests? In her books on the wildlife that have their home in the jungles and to those who live in our backyard, Arefa Tehsin's writing brings alive the natural ecosystem in all its varied colours. Her latest book for young readers, The Great Indian Safari is an exciting drive through the forests of India, with the Jungle Crow as its narrator.  If you have booked a wildlife safari, we suggest taking this book (there's a lot in here for adults as well!) as your guide. The jungle crow, known as Charred the Bird, will rap some songs, steer you in the right direction (you know, tourists do behave little wildly in the forests....) and is full of sane advice and nuggets of information that you can ponder on.   With eye catching illustrations, songs and introduction to animals from tigers, to cobra and gharial and hares, The Great Indian Safari gently prods us to look at the life teeming in the jungle with a sense of wonder, curiosit...

  Learning to live again    Not every teenager has fond, rainbow tinted growing up experiences. They have been ignored deliberately, their peers unwilling to come to their aid, or speak up for them.   These teens for various reasons – their physical attributes, medical condition, economic background or gender identity – become ‘the other’. Simply because the larger, ‘normal’ society doesn’t know how to deal with them. Paro Anand’s short story collection, The Other, nudges us to not to sweep away the unpalatable truths under the carpet. But to take note and bridge the divide. The nine stories delves into the not so happy emotions and feelings that the teenagers confront with and at the end offers a workable solution. Sanjana picking the boy with the pee-bag as her first choice to act in a fairy tale does wonders for his confidence; parents suggesting their daughter to call a helpline number in case of violence against females is a corrective action. And what...

  In a world that loves labelling and slotting people into categories, the freedom to choose and to speak our minds is not easy. In the graphic novel, ZardoZi- Stitched with Love, 10- year-old Zi thinks he has lost his voice and his parents and friends will never be able to hear his truth. But someone recognises Zi’s innate talent and patience to learn and practise the art of embroidery. It’s Zi’s grandmother -- Rani the Naani – who is unlike the other elders in Zi’s family. Rani the Naani believes in living in the moment and knows that ‘nothing is too girlish or boyish’. Arts is for everyone! She hands over her book of embroidery designs to Zi and the boy feels encouraged to present a zari-work for his school’s annual day. He begins with liquid zari work and boy! He transform a sober black coat into something stunning! In this gently embroidered tale of Zi coming into his own, the author and illustrator Debasmita Dasgupta, addresses the oft quoted, but poorly understood, t...

One Lives on Hope... History is omnipresent, even if we make it a habit of  "moving on with life." It seems easier to keep your head low, buried in sand, and avoid acknowledging conflicts and crisis situations. But history, the socio-political times that we live in, shape us knowingly or unknowingly. It has ways of creeping in, tip-toeing in the form of biases, prejudices that positions us in the social hierarchy and pushes us to take a stand. How many of us are able to stand up for others, how many of us can change the course of river to what it rightfully was and how many of us can come to the aid of those who meant us no harm, and yet ended up paying a heavy price? Is it easier to rise above trauma and heal? It is; if we have empathy. Sucharita Dutta-Asane's collection of short stories, These Tongues that Grow Roots, turns around the subjects of bleak headlines -- of war, naxalism, pandemic, lonely senior citizens, dying lakes, eve-teasing and feeling of being hunted -...