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...Posted by Ishani
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My maternal cousin (brother in Ishani's lingo), BVS Prasad, has taken to writing Telugu stories and sketching Telugu cartoons after his retirement. His dad had translated Gita into Telugu verses, and genes tell.
Prasad has become an outstanding success, publishing 50 odd stories in reputed Telugu magazines. Many of these have won awards at the state and national and international levels.
He has recently compiled about 25 of these stories and published them as a paperback. And he was kind enough to gift me a copy which arrived yesterday. I started reading the booklet at once and finished it by the evening.
Meanwhile Ishani arrived at my sofa and asked what it was that I was reading so studiously. I gave her the booklet and she took it in her hands and exclaimed:
"Oh! Your brother writes stories in Telugu?"
"Yes"
"How great!"
And she left me.
And I was left wondering.
When I was her age (6) I knew only Telugu language and script. We had our first lessons in the English alphabet after we reached Class 6 (Ishani is in Class 2 and her second language is Hindi...the first has been English for 5 years; and in future her third would be French or German...not Telugu, no way).
When I was her age I did see English books on my father's table and wondered:
"Oh! They write in English! How great!"
Times have changed...
I have been buying many English classics of late and also reading them. Building what I call Ishani's future Home Library.
The latest two I finished reading are Homer's Penguin Classics: Iliad and Odessey. In exquisite prose by the English scholar EV Rieu.
And then I felt nostalgic about our own epics. I had read C Rajagoplachari's Ramayan and Mahabharat when I was in my first year at our university. So I ordered both of them.
And started reading his Mahabharat.
The tales are familiar and nice. But the English is horrible...to me at my age.
No Englishman ever writes that pedantically...for example: "He was wroth".
RKN wrote almost like an Englishman and that was why Graham Greene was enchanted enough with his prose that he took young RKN under his wings and broke his publishing jinx.
But CR is different...I suspect Hemingway shot himself dead on reading CR's Mahabharat ;)
Anyway, the British were wicked to the inhabitants of their world-wide empire and sucked their blood relentlessly. So Great Britain should sink into the sea and vanish if there were any justice on this earth.
But not their language, not to worry...the Indian version of it would survive and thrive forever...at least as long as I keep blogging...
...Posted by Ishani
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