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An inheritance of loss

Everyone's complaining that children don't read anymore. But if parents are reading, children are certainly inspired too, says KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH, on International Children's Book Day

PHOTO: SHAJU JOHN

STARTING EARLY International Children's Day is organised annually to inspire a love of reading and to call attention to children's books Photo: Shaju John

The first person I mention the International Children's Book Day to, predictably repeats the usual line about children and reading: "Children don't read anymore". If you look a little deeper, you'll find that this generalisation is spread too thin; "children" is an enormous compartment including sponge-like two-year olds, eager four, five, six and seven-year olds, adventurous eight, nine, ten and eleven-year olds, all of who do read, as well as teens, who are the ones that are "not reading anymore."

Efforts are on

If you are a parent who worries that children don't read any more and that no-one is doing anything about it, the idea of International Children's Book Day should gladden your heart because it is organised annually by the member countries (including India) of IBBY, The International Board on Books for Young People, to "inspire a love of reading and call attention to children's books" as part of a worldwide initiative committed to bringing books and children together.

This year, New Zealand-sponsored children's Book Day celebrations include a celebratory poster based on the theme "Stories Ring the World", a Message to the Children of the World and an anthology of short stories for children entitled "Out of the Deep and Other Stories" from New Zealand and the Pacific, brought out by Reed Publishing and Storylines/IBBY NZ, apart from readings and other activities.

If children are not reading, it may not be either for lack of good reading material or of interest, but simply because they have not become accustomed to reading, as they have been to TV watching! As Jyothi Sarath, who runs the much-liked `Work Room' at Sishu Griha Montessori, puts it: "How can you expect your children to read if you are not reading yourself? Parents are not reading, teachers also are often not reading." She feels that it's not impossible to push children towards reading by insisting, at least a few will begin to read after a while, but it works so much better when children are inspired to read because they see their parents reading.

Says Jayan Krishnan, a forty-year-old businessman, who feels restless without a book to read, "When I was a child, my parents read every day, so did we and they bought books for themselves as well as for us; books were like groceries, continually used and replenished!" His two children read everyday too and he says that he and his wife rarely have problems finding good books, as his own parents did some years ago.

Many parents are able to order/get books from the U.K and U.S, where children's bookmaking is an older, better-organised, better-funded industry; many of these books are available here too now. India has an ancient, but broken tradition of children's storytelling, especially the writing, making and distributing/selling of such books, which is now getting to its feet. According to Gita Wolf, Publisher, Tara Publishing, "This is a dynamic time for children's book publishing in India and exciting things are happening across the country."

Gita Wolf talks of the need to "... .to see children's writing taken seriously as a category, and not merely cute tales that anyone can write," and adds that "the idea that books need to be didactic is slowly changing, especially over the past ten years"

Harini Gopalswami Srinivasan, whose book, "The Smile of Vanuvati", has been recently released by Tulika Books says: "Children are no fools... you may pack your writing with the most interesting things in the world, but if the narrative fails to grip — anywhere from page one to the end — they will simply abandon it. No question of waiting and seeing if it improves."

Thriving industry

Across the world, there is a now-thriving children's book publishing industry; Sweden — whose Tove Jansson and her Moomintroll are one of the earliest and most-translated children's classics of the twentieth century — Japan, Spain and India all publish children's books in several languages and dialects.

In India, the National Book Trust publishes in 18 Indian languages and the Children's Book Trust has books in Hindi, in addition to English books.

There are also private initiatives like Akshara Foundation's Pratham Books (which Jyothi Sarath names as one of her favourite publishers, for its combination of affordability with great content and production) that can afford to forgo profits. Initiatives such as this just might make real Harini Sreenivasan's wish for Indian books, "I wish they were better distributed and much better displayed in book shops."

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