Engage a four-year-old in a conversation today and your audience, you will find, is a distracted little child who is not at all pleased at being dragged away from her newest fun app. But even 10 years ago things were different. There was a time when children gathered around their grandparents, eager for one of those little allegorical stories grandmothers seem to have stored away in their vast reserves.
The evening at Landmark was a nostalgic one, if your childhood meant throwing stones at the neighbour’s mango tree, riding your bicycle through narrow lanes at breakneck speed and, of course, gathering round your smiling grandmother as she told you stories of her childhood. Those were the feelings Sudha Murthy intended to revoke, with her latest collection of children’s tales, Grandma’s Bag of Stories, released by Prerna Shah.
“Back in those days, we had joint families, so children spent a lot of time with their grandparents,” said Sudha Murty. “Today, things are different. And being a grandparent is the best, because you can have lots of fun with your grandchild!”
A dramatised reading of the book by Padmavati Rao and Vasanthi Hariprakash saw a small group of children gravitate toward the crowd, which was quite a compliment to the author! You can look forward to tales of kings and queens, gods and talking animals, where magic is quite commonplace. A little collection of stories told by grandma, as seven children enjoy the quiet life in her little town. “Stories for children need to be witty and fun, with a sugarcoated lesson,” she said.
It’s also quite likely that parents will enjoy their storytelling sessions just as much as the kids will, because for whatever reason, grandma’s little tales, silly though they might be, are always charming! Perhaps because in that world, everything always turns out right in the end.
