Hyderabad: “You are not doing a service to the language when you learn, you are doing a service to yourself,” says anthropologist, author and mother Uma Challa.
The assertion comes from a genuine need to protect languages and pass it on to the next generation.
And that is what Uma aims to do for as long as she “has the energy to”.
Uma conducts workshops at Our Sacred Space on storytelling, poems that have purely been passed on as oral tradition alongwith adding a some fun with traditional games.
“Today’s children have so much visual and audio stimulation that you need to take all their learning experiences to that level. You cannot expect a child to just pick up Telugu books and start reading,” she says.
Her rhythmic mode of instruction has also proved to work best for learning.
Having returned from the US where she studied anthropology, Uma was put into the role of a mother in 2011.
“When I had my daughter, I realised that there is a dearth of books or resources to learn Telugu,” she says.
Today, her daughter knows four languages — English, Hindi, Telugu and French — owing to her flawless teaching techniques.
To ensure that her 10 self-published books are picked up at stores, Uma added illustrations to her books.
These illustrations were also made by her. “No, I am not trained in writing or art. But when I approached illustrators, they weren’t able to represent my ideas so I decided to do it myself,” says Uma, who was, interestingly, an activist of judicial and legal reforms.
