Celebrating Our Myths

We're celebrating Our Myths! This hugely popular series of books features timeless stories drawn from popular and marginal sources, which gently question stereotypes and rigid notions about myths.

Myths may share beginnings, meet in the middle or find themselves face to face at the end. Sometimes they're as multi-layered as nesting dolls, with one story concealed within the other. They unravel as they are told, and change as they travel from one place to another, one storyteller to another, one listener to another. And so there is always another version of the same story...

For instance, according to one version, Hanuman wrote his version of the Ramayana on banyan leaves. Another version tells how he wrote it down on the rocks of a mountain. Valmiki had to climb up and down to read it and was quite exhausted at the end of it! Picture Hanuman in a banana orchard. He's probably being a monkey and digging into a banana while Valmiki reads. Now picture him atop a mountain. Maybe he's swinging effortlessly from one rock to another adding doodles to his story while Valmiki pants...!

Celebrate Our Myths with us! Here's what you have to do:

1.Put up a post which features two (or more) versions of a myth. Share the link via email or leave a comment on our blog. If you don't have a blog, write to us at tulikabooks@gmail.com with the subject: Celebrating Our Myths Blogfest: Title of your entry. We will post it on the Tulika blog.

2.Keep it short  (between 300 - 500 words). If you can remember, tell us where you first heard (or read) the story. (Include this in a short note at the end of your write-up.)

3.Post your write-ups and send your entries by September 10.

We'll collect interesting responses and post samplings with links to original posts/publish other responses received via mail. Selected participants will win a free copy of the latest book in the series, It's all the same!, retold by award-winning animator and filmmaker Nina Sabnani and illustrated by artist Satyanarayan Suthaar. 

Coming soon...an exclusive It's all the same! book trailer!

Reading A Kite Called Korika

There are some picture books I return to, time and again, whose details I can see with my eyes shut, whose words I can hear. Listening doubles the pleasure of reading, and if you can hear the voices of different characters as you read, imagine if it is soft or rough, quiet or serious, you get closer to them. Great stories carry you so close, that you become the invisible insider who was there all along, not after the story was written, but as it was being created. 

Ever since I read A Kite Called Korika, I’ve been thinking about it. Every single day. I close my eyes and there are so many things I can see...

I can see the field in which Yella’s parents work, where it is warm, but a cool wind moves through the crops now and then. When Yella hugs his knees close and sits next to the fruitseller, I can see the peepal leaves that have fallen down next to him, I can see the overripe fruits in her basket, I can see Yella’s eyes as he looks up at the sky – just a moment before he discovers that it’s – a kite! – that’s floating up above. 

I can see Malla, wanting everything his big brother has, so good-naturedly that you would want to hug him all the time (if you weren’t Yella, that is!) and I can hear the rustling noise Korika makes when Yella stuffs him inside the hay, so Malla doesn’t find out. And when he falls ill, I can feel Malla’s chest, how warm it is…

Why is this an unforgettable book? 

Is it the pictures that make the reader dream with and for Yella and Malla and delicately capture the bond between the brothers? 

The unassuming narrative which tenderly portrays how children can be both intensely vulnerable and tremendously strong, often without knowing it? 

The relief and hope the fulfillment of a dream can bring, which is such a reward in itself, that it doesn’t matter who knows if it came true or not? 

It is all of these and much more.

Niveditha Subramaniam

Wind Beneath Her Wings

Friendship is one of the Olympic values. Why? What does friendship have to with being a champion? Award-winning para athlete Malathi Holla's story, from India at the Olympic Games, says it all...