Do you know how big an elephant’s sneeze is?
If you’d been at Desi Stories for Children today you would’ve known. Or about the room with gifts for everyone from every continent, town, city, village, building, inland, outland…
Deepa Balsavar is someone who loves to tell stories, and most of them are in her head rather than in a book. She held an audience of about 30 kids, 50 adults, and 2 kittens absolutely spellbound with her stories.
The lovely purple durries were a great idea, because the chairs filled up with grown ups. Deepa herself decided to sit on the stage rather than the park benches we had had set up, to be close to the kids sitting on the ground. We so loved her first story that we couldn’t help request her for a second one. The interaction with the kids was just great.
In fact we had a great bunch of kids, and while we were testing out all our various visuals (and screening our sponsors’ ads) a cheeky little girl in the front row struck up a conversation with me and wanted to ask why the roses on my shoes were beige, and not coloured. I promptly told her the truth - the shoemaker fell asleep before he could paint them, and they were sent to the shop colourless. This particular girl goes to St Anne’s, a girls’ school, ‘it’s so boring’.
‘Boring’ was what this little girl was mouthing to me when Deepak was reading. Unfortunately, while Deepa’s stories were great for the age group we had, mostly below 10, they couldn’t quite appreciate Deepak’s excerpt from Ranthambore Adventure. I personally know how great those are on the page, because my brother had come along just to see Deepak after reading that particular book and loving it.
Mukand and Riaz was very impressive, but I wish we could’ve started a little later, so that it was even darker. Nevertheless, the kids liked both the film and the book, and thanks to me, they now know its author Nina Sabnani as the filmmaker who only makes ‘cartoon films’ (thank god, said my cheeky little friend in the front row).
The slideshow is when the exits began, purely because we had very few people the right age for it. But for me it was made up for by the voice that piped up and said ‘Red Panda!’ as soon as the said animal made an appearance on screen. This particular child - I couldn’t tell from the voice if it was a girl or a boy - went on to identify a few other creatures with cameos in Wild India whom I must confess even I can’t name correctly. Thank God they still make kids like that!
From the children’s section, we moved on to Room to Read’s presentation by their country head, Sunisha Ahuja, and finally, to the event I had been waiting for.
CS Lakshmi had told me in an earlier mail not to make her come all the way if no one was going to come and listen. Though we didn’t exactly have a packed house for the screening of Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices, we did end with a handful of people more than we started out with. I believe that a forum like Kala Ghoda should be committed to showcasing projects like SPARROW too, besides the usual gamut of poetry and prose.
And there is always a special someone in the audience who stays on till 9pm and makes it worth it all: today’s special person award would probably be a tie between the surprisingly young boy who asked for extra SPARROW brochures and took down the website address, and our friend who shouted out Red Panda.