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Life through a child's eye

By penning "Kid's Recipe for Pizza Paisa Peace," eight-year-old Raja Monsingh becomes the country's youngest author

PUTTING DOWN HIS THOUGHTS Raja Monsingh

Since age three, Raja Monsingh has been expressing great thoughts of and on. When he said something profound, his psychiatrist mother Subha Charles jotted it down. By the time he turned seven, she had collected enough material for a book. And encouraged by her sister, she began to work on one.

Based on Monsingh's musings, the book "Kid's Recipe for Pizza Paisa Peace" (KRPPP) was recently launched. According to a representative of the Limca Book of Records, eight-year-old Monsingh is likely to be announced the youngest author in the country. "I am told that an eight-year-old girl wrote a book of verse, but it was rejected for want of quality," says Subha.

KRPPP takes you through a child's world — petty fights with friends, need for attention, snakes and ladders, white lies and so on. Written in a semi-poetical style, every chapter is born out of something Monsingh experienced. The boy spoke his lines in Tamil; Subha and educationist Usha Paul Raj smartened them up and put them down in English. Cartoonist Madan has done the illustration for the cover. It shows a man piloting Planet Earth and his small son passing on an advice, "Time to put the plane on auto pilot, Dad!"

When Madan met the boy, he asked him questions about his school. And when the subject turned to friends, the boy came up with a spectacular thought. Says Madan, "The boy said you can't be friends with someone you don't pick up quarrels with. You can have a smooth relationship with strangers. But this relationship is dead and it cannot progress beyond pleasantries. But when you fight with your friends, friendship is deepened. But don't fight too much, you will lose the friendship." At the book launch, the boy sometimes misread questions from the audience and sometimes went off on a tangent. But some of his answers belied his age.

"For all his perceptive remarks, Monsingh is not a prodigy. Precocious? Yes. But not a prodigy," says the mother. Monsingh is already an entrepreneur. "He's good with his hands. He paints on glass and frames it. Displaying these products in a corner of his father's office, he sells them to his clients," laughs Subha.

Monsingh believes he can make money through books. "He thinks of himself as a plant and his abilities as roots. The ideas he shares with me is the biggest root. Knowledge acquired from formal education is one of the smaller roots," says Subha.

It appears that Monsingh speaks his mind unmindful of censure. When his grandmother asked him to attribute his wisdom to God, he asked a rhetorical question, "Do you want me to lie?" But his mother believes his safe birth is a medical miracle. She conceived at 38 and medical reports pointed to birth of an abnormal child. Considering she had had a stillbirth prior to this, doctors' advice to abort the child seemed sensible. But Monsingh arrived, proving all the predictions wrong. In the second section of the book called `Mother's Reflections', Subha writes about this and other things that make Monsingh worthy of attention.

Priced at Rs. 145, "Kid's Recipe for Pizza Paisa Peace" is available at all leading bookstores in the city. Proceeds from the book will go towards supporting children with cerebral palsy.

PRINCE FREDERICK

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