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The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Feelings are Snowballs

Illustrations by Copilot Designer Feelings are like snowballs. They make a small start as minor emotions or subtle reactions. Unless they are brought under the control of rational thought, they are likely to intensify as we dwell on them or as new experiences amplify them. It’s just like the snowball picking up more snow on the way and growing bigger. And bigger. That big snowball gathers greater momentum as it hurtles down the hill. Soon it will acquire an unstoppable energy. Quite the same thing happens to feelings. They become powerful enough to control our thoughts and actions. It should be the other way around: our reason should control our emotions. Let us consider an example. Nationalism is a feeling. Contrast it with rational truths. A simple rational truth is 2 + 2 = 4. Indisputable. We all learnt at school that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. That is another indisputable truth. Unless you’re living on Kilimanjaro where water boils at about 80 degrees Celsius. On the...

A Journey

Illustration by Copilot Designer The weekend carried me far. I travelled by Kerala’s state-run buses to a place 250 kilometres from home on Saturday and back home on Sunday. I was going to attend the wedding of the daughter of an old friend. A few other friends were coming too. It was going to be an old pals’ meet in a way. We, the pals, lived under the same roof from 1975 to 1978. We were teenage students then. Now we are all in our mid-sixties. How much has life changed us? I was curious to know that. Life had transformed me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined back then. What about them? The bus journey became quite bumpy and rough as I crossed Trissur and moved towards Kozhikode. The highway was being broadened. A lot of work was going on all along and the dust rushed into the bus prompting me to cover my nostrils with my handkerchief which became a mask. I closed my eyes too. The bus moved on and my mind moved inward. I have already reached the last stage of personal developme...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...