Ernakulam by day

I lived in Ernakulam (Kochi, Kerala) for about 6 years. I was a student. It's always nostalgic for me to go back to that city on whose roads I cycled kilometres and kilometres - especially from college to the Public Library and back to college during off or boring periods.

The city has changed much from those days (1980s). The marine drive looks totally different. The backwaters smell putrid. They smell of business, in fact. Here is a ship/boat that runs the business.

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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

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

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

Going Places with Sophie

Sophie as imagined by Copilot Designer Going Places is a short story by A R Barton prescribed for grade 12 students of a Central Education Board in India (CBSE). Sophie, the young protagonist, is just completing her school and will soon be working in a biscuit factory near her home as most girls of her socioeconomic class usually do. Sophie doesn’t want that future, though. She has big dreams. She wants to open a boutique, or become an actress, or be a fashion designer. She is in love with Danny Casey, the national football champion, and believes that he reciprocates the love. She believes that her fantasies about her meeting Danny in the arcade are real. Her father who is very practical and realistic has only contempt for Sophie’s fantasies. “One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” he warns his dreamer-daughter. The father is a traditional patriarch who works hard to get the family moving from day to day. He can be rough and blunt. He doesn’t know a

The Waste Land as a comic book

One page from the comic book Who would have imagined that T S Eliot’s convoluted poem, The Waste Land , would one day be a comic book? I was fascinated when I came to know about it from an article in Open Culture . The sample pages reproduced in the article look charming too. My first association with The Waste Land was as a postgraduate student of English literature. The imageries and motifs of the poem caught my fancy. But I’m not sure I understood its deep intricacies. The sluggish resistance to life in the opening lines shakes your very roots, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” We don’t want to be reborn. We are happy with our hibernation. It’s a sort of spiritual hibernation. We need a reawakening. That’s what the poem is leading you to. Eliot was shaken by the disillusionment that descended on the world after the World War I. There was untold devastation which went on to exert profound impact on society, culture, and art. The war shattered the belief in progress, rat

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