shyamala's world

Award winning author,director and artist Venita Coelho is out with a new book for young adults.  Scroll down to find out more.                                                                  A child with multiple personalities is a rare and challenging subject. What inspired the main character?     I had an image in my mind that haunted me for a long time. An image of a child alone and locked in the dark. Scared. Lonely. And in my imagination I began to give him companions because I couldn’t bear for him to be alone. Sitting at a notebook one day I suddenly thought ‘Of course. They are his multiple personalities!’  Then of course the idea excited me so much I decided to send them on an adventure together. I let Castor out of the basement he had been locked into a...

Festival Stories Through The Year  is Rachna Chhabria's first release with Harper Collins (India). Rachna shares her experiences while writing this book. Rachna Chhabria is a columnist with The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle. She writes for many newspapers, her stories have been published in several anthologies. She is the author of Lazy Worm Goes on a Journey, The Lion Who Wanted to Sing and Bunny in Search of a Name. In the second week of July, Harper Collin’s Children’s Editor Tina Narang emailed me asking if I was willing to work on a book based on festivals. Tina was my editor at Scholastic. I was initially hesitant as this was a non-fiction project and also because of the time crunch, I had to submit the book by the end of the month. Nevertheless, I took it up as a challenge. After brainstorming, Tina and I decided to create a group of characters who would celebrate all the festivals. Luckily for me, two years back I had written an article on few festivals for an O...