Grey hair often settles into the pages of children’s books. Here is why.
Classic children’s literature is fodder for academic research. The irony is that tales that barely fill an A3 sheet inspire interpretations so voluminous they can crash servers.
The closer an interpretation is to current affairs, the greater its traction.
Here is an example from recent times. In 2019, in the study titled “Hans Christian Andersen in Trumpland”, Clara Juncker from the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, attempted to deconstruct “Trumpism” by recording the echoes of two timeless stories by the legendary Andersen, as she heard them in Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the style of governance that followed it.
Reason Two: Grown-ups also go back to these classics for day-to-day guidance.
The tragedy is that while grown-ups find inspiration and solace from children’s literature, and also drive political narratives with it, children’s hands are often found void of this resource, and is instead filled with gaming-consoles.
Around this time in 2020, during the very first lockdown, a gated community corrected this anomaly. It sought to return children’s books to where it belonged.
Incidentally, it happened around International Children's Book Day — April 2, which marks Hans Christian Andersen’s birth anniversary.
Parents at Rani Meyyammai Towers (RMT) in MRC Nagar were puzzling out how to keep children gainfully engaged during the lockdown.
A confabulation in an online group threw up options, one of which was a regular book-reading session on Zoom. There was a ready volunteer in Lakshmi Mitter, an RMT resident and someone writing content for children’s publications.
Jayashree Sunderasan, an RMT resident, recalls, “The idea was to get the reading habit and interest going. Lakshmi would choose a portion of a book or take an article, and ask the children to read it aloud. Through leading questions, the exercise ascertained how well the children had comprehended it.”
“I volunteered to organise reading sessions for children in the age groups of 7 to 10 and 11 to 14,” says Lakshmi. “Each group would meet for an hour or so, every day, on Zoom.”
With lockdown blending seamlessly into another lockdown and then another, what was conceptualised as a short-term exercise became a workaday feature at RMT. And in time, it gave rise to a structured exercise that came with a fee.
“The exercise went on for two months, after which it became a paid programme. The idea to make it a structured, paid programme came from the parents themselves,” says Jayashree.
“Talking Circle, as it is called, is a cohort-based reading programme for children, with two streams. Young Readers Club (7-to-10-year-olds) meets twice a week to discuss books, reading and analysing them together. Young Executives Club (11-to-14 year-olds) features group discussions and debates in addition to reading. News gets bunged into discussions. Sometimes, activities centre around resolving a real-life problem, chipping away at it as a team. The older age group is also put through writing assignments,” says Lakshmi, who was earlier running a personalised story-book publishing enterprise, which wound up operations around the time the pandemic started.
She underlines that parents’ experience is that peer-based group reading encourages children to continue with reading books, as this form of reading as well as sharing from the books they have read individually, constitute a social activity.
“A set of parents think when peers recommend books, children are motivated to read them, and also persist with the genre. They may also choose other genres simply to share with their peers,” says Lakshmi. “Every time a new book has to be started, I put up the covers and blurbs of three books, putting them to a vote by the children. The one that garners the most number of votes from the children qualifies for the group reading session. I will be putting up the pages to be read on the screen and sharing the screen with the children.”
Lakshmi points out that Talking Circle now is not only about children from RMT, but includes children from other cities, including Hyderabad, Cuddalore, Jaipur, Bengaluru and Pune.
“There are 35 children on board, and they joined with their parents learning about the initiative mostly by word of mouth.”
