First the fluorescent pink with sketches of a family of six on vacation catches your eye. Then, when you turn the pages, the illustrations stand out. And finally, you put on your thinking cap to solve the puzzle, the clues of which lie in the illustrations. Manjula Padmnabhan's latest book, “The World Tour Mystery” (Tulika Publishers, Rs. 150) takes readers on a twelve-stop trip to monuments, sites and wonders of the world with a family of six: Mum, Dad, Mimi aunty, Bunny, Bobo and Kooks.
Padmanabhan has written several books, including “Where's the Cat?”, “Same and Different” and a multilingual picture book “I Am Different”. For the artist, writer, illustrator and comic strip creator, producing a book is similar to any other enterprise.
“Whether it's making a piece of toast or going on a six-month expedition to Borneo: you identify a goal and then you create a plan for attaining it,” the author says in an email interview.
“In this case, the goal was to publish a book in which a young reader gets a chance to ‘visit' a number of interesting places within the pages of the book and to solve a puzzle.
“The plan included very many steps. Amongst them, for instance, was deciding which interesting places would be featured. Another step was deciding whether the book would be purely a puzzle-book or a story with human characters. Finding the right balance between telling a story and creating a puzzle took a great deal of thought. The drawings and the text were the easy part! They took maybe four months (not all at once), whereas the planning took more than five years, if you include an earlier plan for the book, in which there were only monuments, no characters.”
Padmanabhan has illustrated several children's books. Her play “Harvest” won the Onassis Prize in 1997. When asked to comment on the layers in her works, Padmanabhan replies, “I cannot possibly comment on the layers in my work! That is a subject for scholars and academics. I am merely the potter, not the earth from which the pot is made, nor the heat which hardens the earth, nor the users who will ultimately decide whether or not the pot is good, bad or indifferent. I write or draw according to my pleasure — meaning, I follow my inclination and my preferences in terms of story ideas and colours, drawing techniques and points of view… I can't cater to every possible reader, so instead I just cater to my own taste and hope for the best.”
