There's something about Indians who settle across the seas, and their love for mythology. It's not a general blanket statement, stereotyping all Indians that way, but look around among your own immediate family and friends and tell me if our kids here are not more hooked on to Bob the Builder rather than the story of Karna. Hema Vaidyanathan, children's author who lives in Switzerland and produces beautiful books on Indian mythology, admits it may be true. But she argues it's more a young urban parent phenomenon.
The author, whose second book “Tail Tales” was released recently in the city, furthers the idea: “It's true that when parents leave India, their sense of anchor is gone. It strikes you that there's a lot of Christmas and representations of other faiths around. But the sound of the Indian milieu is not there. And one wants to introduce kids to what we connected with. But I see that even parents in India want their kids to be re-connected and re-introduced to what they grew up with, not just NRIs.”
With two “cross-cultural children” of her own, who were born and brought up outside India, Hema saw herself dealing with a whole lot of issues.
“How do you explain to a four-year-old why Ganesha's head had to be chopped off by his father so that he could take on an elephant form?” asks Hema, explaining how difficult it is to deal with violence in mythology. “I couldn't read them Amar Chitra Katha because it has such gratuitous violence imbedded in them. And they are not carefully edited.”
Hema decided that the stories she tells will have a dash of humour. “Our idea is to bring lesser-known mythological characters and present them as short stories. We're so used to blue Krishnas and purple Shivas…we're trying to be more down-to-earth. A lot of children's books tend to be ‘written down' or ‘dumbed down'. There's a perception that a child doesn't want to learn, which is so wrong.”
Her latest book “Tail Tales”, in fact, looks at the monkey king Vali from stories of the Ramayana, his brush with Ravana and Dundhubi, the buffalo-demon.
Hema points out how, on the other hand, her generation connected very seamlessly with mythology. “For us, mythology had an everyday connection to it. I come from a traditional family and my mom always told us these little stories. In fact my first book came about when my four-and-a-half year old daughter came home one day excited and asked me ‘Do you know the cuckoo does not build its own nest?' It was a story my mum had heard from my grandmother.” And that's how she started retelling these stories on a blog. An overwhelming response from young mums prompted her to compile them in her first book “Tales of How and Why”, under her banner Amma's Tales.
But no one was willing to publish a children's picture book on mythology. So a family enterprise Dhika Media was evolved to bring the stories to life in a book. And all this must have been quite a world apart for Hema, because, she's actually a scientist (having finished school and college in Bangalore). A PhD in cell biology and biochemistry, to be precise. “I've always had a split personality but somehow didn't think of writing as a possible life. I went to the US to do my masters in journalism and tech-writing but realised that for scientific writing to be taken seriously, you need a PhD.” Till 2007 she did her post-doctoral research in stem cell biology. Then she moved to Switzerland, turned fulltime mum and caught the economy at a downtime. By 2008, she was blogging.
Doesn't she find it ironicthough, that it's generally believed children have lost the reading habit, yet there's such a surge of children's writing? “Yes, it's really strange, but I think there's a bit of both. What happens is that the reading habit drops off when children are between 10 and 12; till then parents have a strong say in introducing books. But it's largely parent-induced reading. It takes focus and incentive from parents to keep them going then on…I mean as an adult I find it so difficult to read a book, leaving my computer aside,” says Hema.
Moreover, children also have to come from school, where they are buried in books to do their learning from more books. So how do you get them to read? “At 13, to read other stuff is cool, like Harry Potter. But an Indian author?!!” she grins, her eyes mock-wide. Hema then quickly says there is hope, because the country is diverging from traditional storytelling possibilities to make reading cool.
The books are priced at Rs. 150 each and are available at select bookstores in Bangalore. You can also check www.ammastales.com.
