A Case for Introducing Comics - Tintin, Asterix etc., in our UG & PG Literature Syllabi...!

Richard Russo | On the Book that helped shape his life

Reflections from Russo on his birthday today! 

Pulitzer Prize Winner and eminent American novelist Richard Russo, when he was asked [by a renowned Magazine] to name a book that helped shape his life -  

‘Let me show you’, says he, and then rising up from his couch, he speeds up quick to his bookshelves, and returns delightfully ‘cradling’ in his hands, “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

This is the first book that he seems to have read, as a little boy!

I was quite intrigued and wonder-amazed at the writer’s impulsive joys when he was asked about a book that had helped shaped his life.

A book that helped shape his life!

Indeed, books possess this intense magical charm on them – ain’t they? - a charm that opens up effortlessly to the ardent and enthusiastic reader, and casts a ‘spell’ on them in such phenomenal ways and sways.

Hence me thought of taking us all into the ‘Garden’ of Children’s Verses, that’s had the legendary Richard Russo charmed for all of his life!

Well, this illustrated book has such beautiful poems, short, cute and sweet, - each poem contained within a single page, with some beautiful illustrations accompanying each of them – to the top of the page.

The very first poem, titled, ‘A Reader’ is such an alluring read in itself – with an equally befitting illustration to match its aura.

Here goes the poem –

To Any Reader

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

As from the house your mother sees

You playing round the garden trees,

So you may see, if you will look

Through the windows of this book,

Another child, far, far away,

And in another garden, play.

But do not think you can at all,

By knocking on the window, call

That child to hear you. He intent

Is all on his play-business bent.

He does not hear; he will not look,

Nor yet be lured out of this book.

For, long ago, the truth to say,

He has grown up and gone away,

And it is but a child of air

That lingers in the garden there.

The power and the charm of books to the child, so beautifully carved out in verse, and in such a sweet and sonorous style!

screenshot from the book

Today, the charm of books has been lost on the child, due to multifarious reasons that we all know, and the pavapetta child is in no way to be blamed here!

The child simply ‘adopts, adapts and adepts’ to the technological lure, that’s right in front of them!

Bringing back the book to the child is then the need of the hour!

Yesterday, while offering my felicitations at the inauguration of the fortnightly symposium of In Tandem, [The Research Club of the Research Dept of English, Queen Mary’s College, Chennai], I had emphasised much on this point as well.

It’s not about getting a degree. It’s not about getting an education. 

It’s about acquiring a qualitative and superior education that would help steer the progress of our society, enhance the standard of living of our people, transform their thoughts and ideas and steer them on the way to becoming liberated individuals. 

And for this higher order thinking to be effective, books play a major role... ...

I had remarked, at the lovely gathering of dignitaries, faculty members, research scholars and PG students of English gathered together on the occasion.

Well, yes! Bringing the book back to the reader is a challenge! 

A real challenge indeed!

In the past few years, many literature departments have pioneered the introduction of graphic novels to their students – both at the UG & PG levels.

A welcome move!

A very proactive move in the right direction indeed!

Graphic novels are sure bound to enhance the attention quotient of today’s kids to a great extent, thus involving them greatly in the process of enjoying their literary delights. 

Through this post, I would like to put forth an earnest suggestion – a case for introducing comics in our UG & PG literature syllabi - comics like - Tintin, Asterix, Tinkle etc that have their own unique literariness and literary sensibilities to them.

Just imagine how nice and how engaging, how good and how pleasant it would be for both teacher and student - to read through a Tintin or an Asterix or a Tinkle in class! 

Yes! Let’s strive to make our literature classes more artsy this way as well!

a 1980s personal copy of Tintin from my little collection...

In addition, schools, colleges and universities should make a provision to include illustrated editions of verses for their students to make the reading experience more joyous and engaging for today’s kids.

I would also like to gently reiterate the fact that, there’s nothing to make the elite in academia to shoo away, and shy away from such an engaging and rewarding enterprise, if – and if at all we want our zoomers [Gen Z] to have a very wholesome experience of reading in their literature classes.

In an age and clime when blended learning and asynchronous classes have become the buzz word, the concept of blended learning could be tweaked a little further [especially in the Cambridge and Oxford versions] 😉 to include - the blending of words with pictures for that inclusive feel and effect on the reader!

To conclude, I would like to reword and rephrase the famed Darwinian dictum on change -  

It is not the most intellectual or the strongest that survives; it’s those that are able to best adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which they find themselves.

Augurs well for the future of literature departments all across the world! Ain’t it?

PS: For an added literary delight on the majestic aura and the glowing halo around lovely books, do tune in to our past post HERE!

'When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin...'

Irving Stone | Bio-history

The Passionate Call of an Artist – Vincent van Gogh

Stone, Irving Stone - has his own sweet aura on him, that he puts forth so majestically, so gracefully, so elegantly and so seamlessly into his writings!

He is known especially for his biographical novels – almost a dozen of them!

Yes! Biographical novels!

Two among them – the Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy have become quite a sensation today, thanks also to their Hollywood film adaptations.

Interestingly, Stone calls his work ‘bio-history’, wherein he carefully selects a certain historical character, does some real, exhaustive research on the character, and then after emphatically and empathetically sliding into the shoes of his chosen character, he reconstructs all his informed lines on them - his biographical novels, after much painstaking probing into an array of diaries, journals, letters, etc.  

Lust for Life (1934), is a profound fictionalized account of the painter Vincent van Gogh – one of the greatest icons of art ever!

Added, Irving tells us that, Vincent van Gogh started learning the art of painting right from scratch, only when he was around 27 years old, and today he’s remembered as one of the best artists to have ever happened to the world of art!

Bespeaks greatly to the Tennysonian maxim –

‘tis not too late to seek a newer world, ain’t it?

Remembering Stone on his birthday today, me thought of reproducing just a few lovely paragraphs from his Lust for Life.

“Your canvases are cold, Cezanne,” he shouted. “Ice cold. It freezes me just to look at them. There’s not an ounce of emotion in all the miles of canvas you’ve flung paint at.”

“I don’t try to paint emotion,” retorted Cezanne. “I leave that to the novelists. I paint apples and landscapes.”

“You don’t paint emotion because you can’t. You paint with your eyes, that’s what you paint with.”

“What does anyone else paint with?”

“With all sorts of things.” Gauguin took a quick look about the room.

“Lautrec, there, paints with his spleen. Vincent paints with his heart. Seurat paints with his mind, which is almost as bad as painting with your eyes. And Rousseau paints with his imagination”.

When I paint a sun, I want to make people feel it revolving at a terrific rate of speed. Giving off light and heat waves of tremendous power.

When I paint a cornfield I want people to feel the atoms within the corn pushing out to their final growth and bursting.

When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin, the seeds at the core striving outward to their own fruition!

Woww! What great grandeur and what sweet awesomeness to these lines of Irving Stone!!!

The call of the artist clarioned so cute and so elegantly by a master-writer – Stone, Irving Stone!

Just one more, on Vincent’s love for books –

Summer thinned into fall. With the death of the meagre vegetation something came to life within Vincent.

He could not yet face his own life, so he turned to the lives of others. He returned to his books.

Reading had always been his finest and most constant pleasure, and now in the stories of other people’s triumphs and failures, sufferings and joys, he found surcease from the ever haunting spectre of his own fiasco.

When the weather permitted he went out into the fields and read for the entire day; when it rained he either lay on his bed under the eaves or leaned a chair against a wall in the Denis kitchen, and sat there for hours, engrossed.

With the passing of the weeks he absorbed the life stories of hundreds of ordinary people like himself, who strove, succeeded a little, and failed a great deal; and through them he slowly got a proper perspective on himself.

The theme that ran through his brain:

“I’m a failure. I’m a failure. I’m a failure,” gave way to “What shall I try now? What am I best fitted for? Where is my proper place in the world?”

In every book he read, he looked for that pursuit which might give his life direction again.

Words that breathe on their own with such an air or reality – with such a reality of representment – on them! Ain’t they dear reader?

Please do grab a copy of these two lovely books, and send me your little observations on the life of the legendary Vincent van Gogh [through the fictionalised lens of Irving Stone].

Happy happy reading to y’all!

'Only a burning patience will lead to the attainment of a splendid happiness...'

Neruda | ‘A Frank, Sensuous Spokesman for Love’ ❤️

[For some Neruda nuggets on his birthday today] 😍

Pablo Neruda, also called the Whitman of the South, was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Interestingly, his teacher, Gabriela Mistral was also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1945 – twenty-six years ahead of her prodigious student – Neruda.

It was Mistral who first recognized the prodigious Neruda’s immense potential and started encouraging him to work on his literary abilities by giving him good books to read on a regular basis.

Billed as a ‘frank, sensuous spokesman for love’, Neruda’s fame today rests on his odes and his poetry – a poetry that could connect quite instantly with the hearts of the lay and the lords alike!

Neruda always had a great passion for travelling, and reading!

On his birth anniversary today, me thought of giving y’all one intense poem from Neruda that I’ve loved so much!

It’s such an inspirational poem on the likes of Kipling’s ‘If’ and it’s titled “Die Slowly!”

Well, the poem emphasizes on the need for living a wholesome life, which would mean, living a fuller and an enriching life. 

To do that, one should take risks, and not be ensconced comfortably in one’s comfort zone, he says! 

Here’s giving y’all nuggets from this fab poem!

He who becomes the slave of habit,

who follows the same routes every day,

who never changes pace,

who does not risk and change the colour of his clothes,

who does not speak and does not experience,

dies slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read,

who does not listen to music,

who does not find grace in himself,

she who does not find grace in herself,

dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,

who does not allow himself to be helped,

who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck,

about the rain that never stops,

dies slowly.

Let's try and avoid death in small doses,

reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.

Only a burning patience will lead

to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

- Pablo Neruda

Inspirational nuggets for all of our lives, ain’t it? 😍

Image: this blogger’s

'A total guillotine on thinking...!'

Amitav Ghosh | On Crisis of Imagination

This post is partly a sequel to yesterday’s post on ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’!

Quoting Eliot,

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Let’s take some little time off, to ponder over this lovely expression –

The ‘what might have beens’ of life!

I guess, this points to the power of the creative imagination that’s been bestowed on each of us!

By means of our creative imagination, we are able to imagine alternative realities, and make possible brave new worlds.

However, unfortunate as it is, the advances in technology have had a very bad effect on the creative imagination. Giovanni Sartori, eminent Italian political scientist, attests to this gradual loss of the creative imagination amongst children [even 25 years ago] because of the advent of television.

Says he,

If our children no longer have the capacity for abstraction, and if the thing is not seen or ‘seeable’, they are not interested to understand, so that’s a total guillotine on thinking.

Shocking observations, ain’t it?

Today the situation is much more alarming on a variety of counts!

This crisis of imagination, is a crisis that we all experience every day!

A crisis in how we value!

A crisis in what we value!

A crisis in who we value!

In short, a crisis in the ways in which we imagine the beautiful world around us, has resulted in our priorities being manipulated for us by the so-called [Foucauldian] ‘powers’ in a [capitalist] society!

Crisis of Imagination requires an urgent crisis management!

What’s then required - is a radical way of reimagining the beautiful world around us, in terms of the crisis that we face today!

That’s hence Amitav Ghosh (today happens to be his birthday as well!) talks at length about the role of students, writers and philosophers in plugging this Crisis of Imagination!

To Amitav, the climate crisis is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination!

He follows it up by saying that,

Our inability to grasp the global climate crisis in its totality is really the biggest crisis of our time.

We simply do not seem to be able to understand that the comfortable climate we have lived in for so long can drastically change in a significant amount of time.

And this is exactly where writers and philosophers should step in. They must help people broaden their horizons, to create new links and to offer new perspectives.

Otherwise our gaze remains too narrow and limited, says Ghosh!

In his seminal book titled, The Great Derangement, Ghosh laments on this lack of literary engagement with climate change!

Says he –

That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish.

To see that this is so we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal and the New York Times Review of Books.

Whenever the subject of climate change appears in these publications, it is almost always in relation to non-fiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon.

Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction.

It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel, says Ghosh!

To lap it up, what we need today is – to reimagine the ‘what might have beens’ of life, through a lovely literary lens towards mitigating issues concerning climate change and global warming – issues that need immediate attention all across the world!

As Albert Einstein beautifully puts it,

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

How true proves this Einstein-ian dictum on the power of the imagination!

So yes! why wait?

Train up your imagination to reimagine the world with the ‘what might have been’ realities and help mitigate the climate crisis – in your own sweet ways! Will ya? 

The ways of a true blue literary being!

Image: this blogger’s!

What's that lovely little impression?

A Bowl of Rose-leaves | Reflections

‘Remembering’ Remembrance on Marcel Proust’s Birthday today!

Well, I’ve always hazarded a wild guess – an uncommon conjecture at that –

that, the Members and the Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, must have surely been inspired, influenced and swayed by the following lines from Eliot, before they all had decided, in such sweet unison, to award him with the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1948.

Here goes the lines -

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves!

I do not know.

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves!

Such an impactful line that has a lot of resonances and reverberations to the burgeoning field of Memory Studies as well!

Now, for bringing out those lovely little impressions from our memory –

Well, what’s that particular song that you so relish down the ages, and that still resonates in your heart and soul even this very moment?

What’s that particular nick-name of yours that you so cherish, across the years, and that still stirs a chord in you even this very moment?

In short, what’s that ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’ moment for you?

Marcel Proust has this amazing penchant of taking us all down memory lane with his nostalgic reflections on one such lovely little impression sliced away from the past –

And what pray, is that lovely little impression?

Tasting a little cake dipped in his tea!

This lovely little impression was enough and more for the writer in Marcel Proust to bring out a vast interconnected array of divergent identities constructed through the realm of memory!

This dunking of a madeleine cake in his tea, thus resulted in his monumental autobiographical novel of epic proportions, titled, In Search of Lost Time, [originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past] that runs to a whopping 4,215 pages, in seven volumes.

Proust recollects with such intense detailed descriptions on his childhood experiences up till his adulthood in early 20th century aristocratic France! He simultaneously reflects on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world!

That’s exactly the ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’ moment for Proust!

Now, what’s your ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’ moment?

What’s your slice of madeleine cake that occasioned a lovely little impression from off your past for you?

And if you’re a literary being, a true-blue literary being, do describe this dunking in as delightful a way as you possibly could!

It could be through a poem! Or through an essay, or through a short story! on your blog! or on your daily diaries!

That then is that lovely ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves!’ moment for thee! 

'I realized that you can make what you want of life...'

Dean or Don? | Birthday Ruminations

Truth or Fiction?

Or - Is truth stranger than fiction or

fiction stranger than truth?

Byron, through his Don Juan would cheerfully say, ‘Truth is always strange! Stranger than fiction!’

But Dean seems to have  proved the Don quite wrong!

Come! Let’s together delight ourselves on a Dean delight today - on his birthday – 9th July 2022!

One of the world’s best-selling authors, with over 120 novels to his credit, Dean Koontz has sure proved that, the power of fiction could be stranger than truth!

Koontz, as connoisseurs of literature would have us believe, had predicted the corona virus even forty-one years ago, in his novel – The Eyes of Darkness (1981).

Dean Koontz here describes “Wuhan-400” as “China’s most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade… developed by labs outside of the city of Wuhan”.

Here goes, snippets from the book –  

Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin.

The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.

“I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tina said. “Right now, I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place.”

“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade.

They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.

“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it”.

And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?”

Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but Elliot knew what the scientist meant. 

“If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”

“Exactly,” Dombey said.

“And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the virus”.

“That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s worse than the Ebola virus in Africa - infinitely worse”.

“Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is one hundred percent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it”.

“The virus migrates to the brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe”.

“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.

“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”

Quite apocalyptic in its import, and quite as scary, ain’t it?

Reminds me of a beautiful line that I quote quite often in my classes – and write it on the white marker board for my students as well!

Here goes the maxim! This lovely lively maxim by Oscar Wilde –

“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose”.

How true proves the ‘Dean’ on this ‘Wilde’ maxim, ain’t it?

Dean Koontz gave one of his most vivacious interviews ever to the Harvard Business Review, where the legend gives us all – literary beings – some lovely takeaways!

HBR: Where do you find your creative energy and stamina?

Koontz: It goes back to what books meant to me when I was young. I came from a very poor family. My dad was a violent alcoholic. Books were both an escape and a lesson that other lives were different. They showed me the level of success the world offered. And that was plenty of motivation to change my destiny. I realized that you can make what you want of life, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped feeling that way. I’ve never stopped being excited about books and the potential of them.

Books were his greatest solace and refuge, says the legendary writer, and hence confesses that -

he has devoted his life - 6:30 AM to dinnertime, six days a week, for the past five decades - to creating fictional worlds across a range of genres for his devoted readers!

PS: You may want to read yet another similar read by Stephen King titled, The Stand (1978), which describes with such intense detailing, the survivors of an epidemic of a human-made virus which eventually wiped out the majority of the population of North America.

'With all excitement, eagerness and enthusiasm writ large on her face...'

Touring through the Bookshelves of Kathy Reichs ❤️

Well, today is the birthday of Kathy Reichs – celebrated American forensic anthropologist and author of the popular series of mystery books centering on the protagonist who goes by the name, Temperance (“Bones”) Brennan.

And yes! I was so thrilled to see the way in which she takes us around her bookshelves, with all excitement, eagerness and enthusiasm writ large on her face!

It was just around the time when she had released her 19^th Temperance Brennan novel, titled, A Conspiracy of Bones.

In this five-minute inspirational vlog, she invites her readers to her office space, where she does the bulk of her writing. The rest of the guided Bookshelf Tour is for us all to see and enjoy, here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJIqTkfGSUs

Speaks volumes to how much her lovely little creative space – her office space – her working space – her reading space means to her, ain’t it?

Makes me ruminate on yet another writer from the good ol’ past – Anne Bradstreet and her creative work space that she got for herself – thanks to her reading space that she so cautiously preserved and relished!

In fact, her father’s connect with the aristocracy facilitated easy access to the Earl’s exhaustive library holdings, which also helped her to read the legendary writers of yore – right from Plutarch, Edmund Spenser, du Bartas, Francis Quarles, Sir Philip Sidney etc.,

Thanks to her library space - her own little reading space, Anne Bradstreet is celebrated and venerated today as a woman with a “spirit of uncommon independence within a man’s world”.

Now the question – How good is your creative space? Your personal reading space? 😍

Would you, my dear students, facilitate such a guided tour through your book shelves for me, waxing eloquent on each of the books in your cute little collection?

If so, when? 

I’m waiting… 😍

The world out there as well! ❤️

Pic courtesy: Screenshot from the YouTube Vlog by Simon & Schuster books

‘Jayanthi, I have a surprise for you!’ 😍

Enga Appa! | Our Daddy!

Well, yesterday, quite early into the morn, I had received a picture of my lovable and adorable Grandpa on my WhatsApp – from Amma!

She had posted it to me on WhatsApp, with the caption, ‘Enga Appa’ – Our Daddy!

Of all the snaps of our grandpa’s that we’ve so loved and admired, and that have endeared him in our memories, this one was quite new at that! We’ve had snaps of other shapes, climes and sizes of grandpa’s! But this one was unique!

He looked so divine! So radiant! So unassuming! So noble! So gentle! So filled with the milk of human kindness!

The divine love oozing from his looks, the boldness in his chiselled visage, the royal demeanour, the kind look, compelled me to probe further into this cute, long lost snap!

So out of curiosity I asked Amma, ‘Ma, for the first time in more than four decades, we are seeing this snap of our grandpa’s! Where was this cute little snap hiding all this while?’

Amma’s reply literally brought tears to my eyes!

And hence me wanted to put down the story for posterity, write here – right here – on my personal creative space!

Amma lost her father to a massive heart attack when she was in school. Having been a doting daughter of her dad, she was the cynosure of his eyes! The pride of his being!

The daddy who takes pride in her laurels, her achievements, her abilities! her skills! her talents – especially her love for music, her singing! And what not!

So when he passed away this sudden, it was something she couldn’t bear! Something she couldn’t cope with!

As a kinda substitute gratification, as daddy’s little girl, she somehow got hold of a snap of her daddy’s, and whenever she felt lonely and blue, whenever she missed her daddy, whenever she felt she needed that extra motivation, whenever she felt she needed that extra strength to move on, she used to take this cute snap of her daddy’s, and admire it! The more she gazed at it, the more the tears trickled down her cheeks!

The more she admired it, the more her heart wilted! The more her heart melted! And the more she cried!

Now, Amma had a friend – a close friend – a childhood friend - her junior by two years – Ms. Rani!

After decades of lost contact, one fine day, Ms. Rani rings up Amma, and renews their lovely bonds of friendship.

And they talk and talk and talk happily on ‘nostalgia mode’ on their good ol’ days over the phone!

This goes on, when suddenly Ms. Rani says, 

‘Jayanthi, I have a surprise for you!’ 😍

‘What’? asks Amma, excited and surprised! 😍

Yes, a surprise gift for you!

All curious, and all intrigued, Amma asks her, ‘Quick, let the cat out of the bag, Rani. Can’t bear to wait any longer to know more about the surprise!’

Says Ms. Rani, ‘Well, I’ve been having this snap of your dear daddy’s, for decades now, safely and carefully preserved in a book. But at last I thought, I should give it to you! Since it rightfully belongs to you. So the next time when we meet up, I shall give you the snap’, says she!

Amma replies, ‘Wait! What! You mean that delightful snap of daddy’s over which I used to gaze and weep all through my class hours?’

‘Yes!’

“Well, in that case, please, Rani, just take a picture of that snap for now and send it to me over whatsapp, pleaseeeee! Will you?” Amma pleads!

Rightaway, says her friend Rani! Her bosom friend Rani, and she soon sends it across as well!

Now, Amma is so excited!

After seeing the snap of her dear daddy’s, in more than five decades now, the same snap that she so loved and cherished, the same snap that brought bursts of tears to her eyes, Amma couldn’t control her joy, her excitement, that she immediately dispatched it on WhatsApp mode to us her children – on whatsapp mode!

The snap was captioned, ‘Enga Appa’!

[Our Daddy]!

This time around, we were in tears – tears of joy for Amma!

Amma had by now, in all these past decades, moved on from the world of emotion to the world of reason, as Charlotte Bronte says of Eyre, Jane Eyre!

And yes! Like Jane had her friend Miss. Helen Burns, who was instrumental in shaping her and tuning her temperament for the better, here was Miss. Rani, almost on a similar vein!

Helen is, “honest, pious, loyal and compassionate, and tries to see the world through others' eyes. She loves and cares for Jane,” says a commentary!

How beautiful a proposition! Ain’t it?

The Spirit of Empathy – as we call it in literature!

So yes! coming back…

Miss. Rani had this to say,

“Well, I saw you incessantly weeping over your beloved Daddy’s photo, day in and day out, for days and days, whenever you saw the snap! So I thought you needed to come to terms with your loss! You needed to move on! You needed to achieve! You needed to grow up!

That’s hence I had to gently take it away from your text book and keep it safe with me! It took me a lot of care to preserve this snap for all these decades, you see!

Now I guess, you’ve grown up! It’s time I gave you back what’s due to you! Your Daddy’s dearest’s snap for you!”,

says she! 😍

Miss. Rani ‘tries to see the world through others' eyes. She loves and cares for her Jane -  her Jayanthi!’ 💛

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