shyamala's world

   P ublished by Puffin India, Tales from the Kathasaritsagara is a collection of nested stories from author and translator, Rohini Chowdhury. The lesser-known tales are a treat not just for kids but also adults. Rohini tells us more about this book of unique tales. How did you enter the world of translation? Growing up in the multilingual world that is India, translation was an inevitable and inextricable part of my life. We move effortlessly across languages, often without even realising that we are doing so. The UK – where I have now lived for the past 23 years – is, by contrast, a staunchly monolingual world. I realised very soon that my daughters would most likely grow up to be more comfortable in English than in any Indian language, and it became very important to me that they should be able to access and read the stories I grew up with – if not in the original language, then at least in English. And so I began translating, little storie...

  Suman Bajpai is a f reelance writer, journalist, editor, translator, storyteller,  and a travel writer. She has been translating children books for over twenty years.  Read on to know more about her world of books and translation. 1.      How did you enter the world of translation? Which languages do you translate? I really don’t remember exactly, how it happened, but after completing my journalism, as I was into writing already and writing for magazines and newspapers and was a talker at All India Radio, I did translate my first book on Rajiv Gandhi, in 1986. At that time there was no plan in my mind to get into this field. I happened to meet the then Editor of Children’ Book Trust in 1987, who gave me a book ‘ Indira Priyadarshini’ to translate and after some time, he also offered me a job for Sub-Editor there and after that, I had started translating books from English to Hindi to promote their Hindi programme. I trans...

Writing for kids has been Debashish Majumdar's passion for over two decades. He has written books for kids of all ages.   Mango DC recently released two of his e-books-Tiger Comes Home and The Magical Sunglasses. Debashish shared info on his books  and writing.                    How did you get into the world of writing? As a little boy, I was sent by my parents to live with my maternal grandparents in Shillong. My grandfather had a small library of his own. He encouraged me to read and write stories on my own.   My grandfather was not only a very literary person, but he would also routinely listen to the BBC World Service. So, I too had taken fancy to listen to short stories broadcast over the BBC. Surprisingly, I wrote my first short story at the age of fifteen for the BBC World Service and I received a lot of praise and encouragement from the Broadcasting Director of the BBC. What was your first book a...

Children's author Monica Khanna recently released three books for children.  While Misha Makes a Mark and Of Girls and Cars and Boys and Dolls have  been published by Mango Books as picture books, Munches, Punches and Manya's Hunches, a chapter book, has been published by  Story Mirror Infotech P ltd.  The content of all three books are worthy of discussion between parents and children. Monica shared some thoughts around her recent releases.                               1. In today's times, are we doing enough to empower our girls through books? Enough is a relative term, and I am not sure we are doing 'enough', but we have definitely started a trend to empower girls - and are also looking at changing stereotypes for boys. This is equally important - for you cannot empower girls unless you teach boys to think differently about their own roles. 2.  What pa...

Veteran children's author, Ratna Manucha, is out with a new poetry book titled It's That Time of the year. In this interview, she shares her world of writing . Q1. How did you get into the world of writing? Going down memory lane, I remember the long, lonely days after school, spent poring over Enid Blyton and later, Thomas Hardy and Louisa May Alcott. I cannot pinpoint exactly when I fell in love with the written word, but I do know this, I was well and truly hooked. People eat meals...I ate books, devoured them, in fact! Then marriage happened, and I got an opportunity to write for All India Radio in Assam and West Bengal and Nagaland. In fact, now that I look back, I realise I was always looking for an opportunity to dabble in the written word. Being married to the Olive Greens, I began contributing articles, poems, short stories and limericks to various local papers and magazines in the different places we were posted to. While in Nagpur, I began writing i...

Valentine's day just passed by.  Love is still lingering in the air. Sundari Venkatraman, prolific author and queen of Indian romance novels, shares her thoughts about  writing romance novels and other stuff.                                                           1.Are you ever tempted to explore other genres?        All the time, though there will always be shades of romance in my books. I have written Indian Mythology for children, the first five avatars of the Dashavatar of Vishnu and published them on Amazon Kindle. I will be writing and publishing the other five avatars this year and maybe more books in this genre in 2021. I love Indian Mythology and I also believe there’s a huge quotient of romance and valour in our myths that call out to me....