Are you ready to be a Wocoteen?

                                    

      Yet another nonfiction book for teens by Bangalore based children's author Roopa Pai!

The framework of Ready 99 is based on Scouting for Boys written by Lord Baden –Powell , founder of the Boy Scout movement. While Lord Baden- Powell’s book is a collection of 28 Campfire yarns meant to serve the children of 20th century,  Roopa’s creation  is a tailor made,modern  version   with  99 skills and challenges for the distraction prone, time crunched, self absorbed digital children of today.

Divided into six categories, the completion of every category is rewarded with a merit badge . The book shows no gender bias. Activities like cooking and flower decoration are included with activities needing wrench, pliers’ and hammer.

 Ready 99  has arrived at the right time. From the importance of equipping oneself for survival to helping, this book covers everything. The language is just right for preteen and teen readers. The book encourages children to explore their potential, challenging them to try out new indoor and outdoor activities to strengthen themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. It also infuses patriotism, coaxes them to be a responsible, self sufficient and selfless. 

Though the book is targeted at preteens and teens, this book is suitable for all ages. Everyone will find something new to learn.  

 For Ready 99’s Woco Teen squad to be a reality, the book needs an adult (parent/teacher) as a facilitator and an accountability partner. Kahani Takbak  interviewed  Roopa Pai to know more about this exhaustive book.

1.        You seem to have taken a break from writing fiction books. Your past three releases have been nonfiction books.  Has your pool of story ideas dried? Exhaustion?  Or just exploring your writing abilities?

Actually, FOUR releases since Taranauts have been non-fiction – What If The World Stopped Spinning & 24 Other Mysteries of Science, The Gita For Children, So You Want To Know About Economics, Ready! 99 Must-Have Skills For The World-Conquering Teenager. My most recent release, Krishna Deva Raya, falls under historical fiction, fiction that is set against the backdrop of actual historical events. And I have done a few small books (fiction) for Storyweaver since the last Taranauts book came out in 2013 – including How Old Is Muttajji? which was recently shortlisted for the 2018 Crossword Awards.

Why have I written so much non-fiction? Because I am interested in a variety of subjects and some of them handle better as non-fiction rather than fiction, that’s all. After doing eight books of pure speculative fiction with Taranauts, I wanted to plunge into other subjects, so I did. That’s all there is to it. J    

2.        Was this book commissioned to you or did you submit the idea to Hachette?

This was a commissioned book. The brief was expansive and unstructured – but the idea was to create a book of life skills that was inspired loosely by Lord Baden Powell’s legendary Scouts and Guides movement. I started by reading his original 1908 book – Scouting for Boys – and was so taken up with it that I decided to do a 21^st century version that was a very visible hat-tip to that book.

3.        From Hatha yoga , diet planning to…  you have done intensive research for this book. How long did you take to write this book?

I think the research and the planning (which is always, for me, the most enjoyable part) took a month of intense reading and thinking. Once I had the structure – the four sections, and the merit badges under each – in place, I began to populate each section, adding challenges as I went along. That took about five months of writing and writing and writing, followed by another month of chopping / tweaking / merging / discarding. It is the longest book I have written so far but it was super fun to do, because I had to research so many different things, which is what I do in my spare time anyway. This time, it was ‘legit’ work, so it felt more virtuous, not like goofing off.  

4.        Did you use any other reference books to help you writing this book?

Mainly, it was B-P’s ‘Scouting For Boys’, as I mentioned before, which I used as an overall inspiration and guide. There was another old fascinating book too, a Scouts manual from 1914, called ‘Scout Tests and How To Pass Them’, that I enjoyed reading, which gave great insights into what was expected of Scouts a hundred years ago. Apart from those, I referred to several survival guide-type books like ‘The Dangerous Book For Boys / Girls’, but found that none of them covered quite the range of skills that I wanted for my book, which was going to be aimed at a modern, urban, INDIAN teenager. The other problem with the more contemporary British and American books in this genre was that they were situated in a very different physical and cultural context from ours, so while they sparked some ideas, I had to really create an entirely new kind of book and place it in our milieu.   

5.        Which part of the book was difficult to research? How many challenges in this book were shaped by your parenting and student experiences?

I think the Pioneer badge and the Starman badge were the toughest for me, personally. About the Pioneer badge – I have always admired people who can build useful, functional things out of poles and strings and bits and bobs, but I’m terrible at it myself.  I was determined to actually learn to tie the different knots (I had been a Girl Guide in school and had passed tests in knot-tying then, but it is the kind of thing that needs regular practice and I had completely forgotten how to do it) before I wrote about them, so this bit took really, really long. As for The Starman, again, I have gone out on at least a dozen star-gazing nights with experts, and I am fascinated by the night sky, but my memory is like a sieve when it comes to retaining what I learn during those expeditions. So I needed to refresh my memory again, test myself a little, understand how this telling-time-by-the-moon thing works (all so that I would like less of a fraud while writing up this section), and that took time and effort too.

Coming to the second part of the question – almost all of them, I think. Since I’ve worked with kids for many years as a history tour guide, I get to interact with them a lot both on day trips and overnighters, and can clearly identify where the gaps lie in their practical knowledge. I also get to observe at close quarters their ability (or inability) to cope with being out of their comfort zones, the ways in which they engage with each other, and their attitudes to things – India, for instance. The challenges were basically constructed to force them to confront those gaps, to review their attitudes, and so on.

And of course, watching my own children and their friends for so many years now also helped tremendously to shape the challenges.   

 

6.        Are your kids WoCo Teens?

I think all kids are WIPs – WoCoTeens in Progress. My kids fall into the same category. The thing about WoCoTeenism is that there is no real end-point to it – it is a lifelong journey. If kids can keep their natural curiosity and their innate live-in-the-moment optimism intact into adulthood, if they can keep learning new skills that are required for their circumstances, their communities, and their times, they will eventually grow into one of those cheerful, resourceful, self-reliant, empathetic and morally-upright adults who inspire others and make a better world without even knowing it. That is really what it means to be a WoCoTeen, and that it is what I am hoping will happen with all our kids.  

7.        The book recommends eating 28 chips a week. What’s the logic behind it?

Haha! I have always thought that chips packets – especially the branded ones – are such a scam, selling more air than chips in their shiny, vacuum-sealed packets. In my opinion, no packet holds more than 28 chips, and I’m being very optimistic here. So when I recommend eating 28 chips a week, I mean eating one packet a week at most. J

8.       What are the three most important skills every child must know/implement from your book? Why?

I think every Indian teen should:

·         Know how to cook a basic Indian meal. The ability to feed yourself and to feed another makes you feel good in body, mind and spirit.

·         Clean his or her toilet and do it as a daily routine. This is more symbolic than anything, but it is one way to help them understand the importance of self-reliance on the one hand and human dignity on the other, in a country where the privileged depend far too much on the ones lower down in the socio-economic hierarchy to do their dirty jobs for them.

·         Volunteer regularly for community service activities. It is high time we as a people – especially as educated, English-speaking, middle-class – and therefore privileged - people - stopped asking what our country can do for us, and start asking what we can do for our country.

9.       What are the three skills in this book every parent/teacher must impart to their children?

There are many more than three, of course, but three of the most essential are the following. Here’s the important bit – parents and teachers have to do this not by TELLING children to do it, but by living it themselves. We have to lead by example, be role models, for we all know that ‘children do not do what you say, they do what you do’.

·         Self-reliance: As Indians, the one virtue that we lack most is self-reliance. We look to others for everything – to clean our homes, cook our food, repair our taps, pick up after us when we throw garbage into the street… The terrible part about this is that we then consider those who do these things as inferior to us. If, at least once or twice a week, the family can get involved in doing all these things themselves – including cleaning the street in front of their own homes – it will teach children a valuable lesson in self-reliance, apart from helping them appreciate the work of people who routinely do those things for them. 

·         Empathy: In my book, this is dealt with under many different heads – Maintain a Sickroom, Learn to Disagree Agreeably, Walk a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes, Learn About A Different Faith. We live in an incredibly diverse country – that is what makes this a quintessential skill for all of us. India has always taught the world how to live comfortably with extreme diversity, this is part of our DNA, and the torch has to pass on to the next generation. This can only happen if the adult practices this too.

·         Taking time to reflect / to enjoy your own company:  This can be achieved in many ways – having a hobby, making a handicraft, spending time outdoors watching trees and birds, are three such ways that have been outlined in my book. In India, we are always surrounded by people, and that makes it even more important for our children to consciously take time out for themselves. Time by yourself allows for reflection, and reflection helps you understand who you really are, which in turn builds confidence and self-esteem. Both are vitally important.  

10.    Much importance has been given to money management skills in your book. How effective are long term and short term goals for today’s kids?

I think what we are now calling ‘financial literacy’ is hugely important for children to be introduced to, in small ways, when they are still young. Many of us adults, especially women, have a very uncomfortable relationship with money – we either hoard it (a hangover from our parents’ times, when money was scarce) or spend it without a care (a rashness that comes from having lived with strained resources as children), especially on our children, devaluing the importance of money for them. Either way, we end up passing on our baggage to our children. Teaching kids to think about and handle money for themselves will help them build their own relationship with money while still within the parental safety net, and will help them develop a far more mature attitude towards it.

The second thing is that I think it is very important for children to realize that money management is not only about spending and saving it, but also about sharing it. By including a ‘Share’ column in the balance sheet I’ve given as an example in the book, I hope we can force them to think about it.

11.    Have you earned all the badges in this book?

No way! I am also a WIP! 

PS:  The e copy of the book I received had  a few glitches. I hope the corrections are made in future editions. 

 To buy a copy of Ready 99(Hachette India) click here.