Amar chitra katha book11/13/2022 ![]() ![]() When I recovered the jackal-and-elephant comic from an ancient closet recently, I realised that this was one of the more unaesthetic Amar Chitra Kathas. As he settles down to eat, there is a heartwarming moral for all of us: “Mighty brawn is no match against nimble brain.” Turn the page, ye inquisitive tot, and find that here, in a comic book created for the delight and edification of children, is a story about a jackal coming across an elephant carcass (“All this meat! All for myself! I need not look for food for weeks”) but needing the help of an animal with sharper teeth to help him make a tear in the thick hide, so he can feast on the delicious, juicy meat within.Įnter a lion, a tiger, a leopard and another jackal, in that order, and we see how our hero gets them all away from his food while also achieving his purpose. So, an image of death straight away, but there’s more to come. I think I remember blinking at that cover for the first time, sitting in the back seat in the dim evening light. This could be a manufactured memory, but I’m almost sure it’s true: We are parked outside the disordered Malviya Nagar market in South Delhi, I’m sitting in the car, waiting (possibly because it is raining outside in my mind, it was always raining and dark and muddy in Malviya Nagar’s back-lanes), and my mother hands me a comic, or a bunch of comics, one among which is the jackal-elephant one. Reader, meet Amar Chitra Katha title number 163: Panchatantra – How the Jackal Ate the Elephant, and Other Stories. It’s an illustration of a very large dead creature lying on the ground in a jungle, while a smaller creature stands disrespectfully on the corpse, looking pensive. Yet a cover image does come into my mind when I hear the words “first book”. When I read my first Somerset Maughams and John Steinbecks around age 12, I was also still reading the Hardy Boys Casefiles.) (And this isn’t restricted to early childhood. Where do I place my Ladybird books (with their different grades, from Reading Level 2 all the way up to Reading Level 5) compared to the Tinkle comics and Enid Blyton’s Noddy series? There was so much overlapping in the reading experience. Even without considering all the colouring books that one must have sullied as an infant, how can one be certain of the very first book they read? The first of these is reductive, unanswerable, even pointless if you direct it at anyone who has been a greedy reader from an early age, having been encouraged by a parent to read as widely as possible. “But how am I to get to the flesh of this elephant?” Two questions, not self-evidently linked: In this monthly column, Jai Arjun Singh scours through his bookshelves to pick out titles that have impacted him at various times in his life. ![]()
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