Standing up...kid style

There has been a lot of standing up for oneself and setting of boundaries that I have been reading about at Starry's blog. Made me think a lot about my own behaviour in the matter.

I had been quite a militant feminist in my teen years. Somewhere along the way, I have morphed into a closet feminist. Somehow got stuck in a rut of my comfort zone. Have been taking baby steps towards getting out of it, but not sure how long I shall take to get even close to getting there. I owe it to my child.

So the child is growing older and needing help dealing with peer interaction. As always, we turn to books- our best friends.

Last year, the tooth fairy (oh, yes, we still believe in those, and Santa, a la The Polar Express) got A a book that she has thoroughly enjoyed. It has been her constant companion over the past year, given that peer interaction is becoming more and more important. Thanks to her petite built and a possibly outdated interest in books and such, she is often the target of those who think they know better. As parents, we keep talking to her about it whenever an 'incident' happens, even stressing on the fact that every person is special in their own way, and that a lot of what those girls say doesn't become true even if it feels like that. That she has so many wonderful gifts that a lot of those girls do not have. That she just needs to ignore most of that behaviour. And at times, stand up for herself and what she thinks is right.

So when she came across this book on amightygirl.com, the tooth fairy thought it would be good thing to get her.

pic courtesy amightygirl.com

Stand Up For Yourself  & Your Friends
Written by Patti Kelley Criswell
Illustrated by Angela Martini
Published by American Girl Publishing
Ages 8+

We begin by defining bullying. It can be many things, but it is mostly about power. And not all bullies are the stereotypical big, tall, loud, intimidating person. Think Miss Agatha Trunchbull from Matilda. Oh, no, they come in different packages, and at one time or another, any one of us could bully someone else.

The book then goes on to deconstruct the politics of bullying as it occurs, and the strategies to handle it. It is peppered with real incidents reported by real girls, the way they handled it, and a lot of expert-speak on each incident. There are short, snappy, two-page chapters on each topic, with full colour illustrations.

There are also many quizzes the reader can take, like 'Is this bullying?' on identifying which behaviours would qualify as bullying, 'What's your speak-up style?' on how you would deal with a given situation and 'What do you stand for?' on your beliefs about friendship. The very practical and easy to apply tips by experts and kids themselves make for a much appreciated 'cool' factor. Or at least I have been informed so by the kid, who dips into the book often for inspiration.

There is also plenty for the bewildered adult who might be the bystander, the authority figure who may have to tackle a potentially explosive situation, or the parent who has to deal with either end of the bullying episode- the bully or the victim. Much that can be used by the adult in their own interaction with power struggles among their peers too.

A book that can be applied at all levels, with sound strategies that can be extrapolated to situations even beyond the scope of the book. And even though I place it at 8+, younger children can benefit from it too- as more and more, these things happen at a younger age in today's world.

The book has an accompanying journal that I'm sure the tooth fairy is currently considering. A journal full of quizzes, checklists and charts that I'm sure the child will enjoy working on with her own experiences.

Crossposted at Saffrontree.

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And while on the topic of standing up - here is my review on Women's Web of Warrior in a Pink Sari- an autobiographical account of Sampat Pal and her Gulabi Gang.

A right to her own self

She is born a woman.

When will her birth be celebrated without any reservations?

Will she ever be able to decide for herself?

Will she ever be free to walk out on the streets without strategizing:
Should I go?
Need I go?
Am I dressed right?
Will I be considered respectable enough?
Is the time OK to go out?
Is it safe for me to be out?
Which way will be safe?
How fast do I need to go to reach a safe place?

When will she be taken seriously?

Will the world ever realize that a no means a NO?

Will she ever be able to universally claim her right to an education?

Will she ever be able to express her thoughts and feelings without worrying about being ridiculed for it or about who might get angry over it?

Will she ever be able to live to her full potential without having to dumb down to conform to others' expectations of her?

Will she ever be able to be true to herself without being apologetic or being made to feel guilty about wanting to be herself?

Will she ever be able to see herself as a human being first, without the epithets of mother, daughter, sister, wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, granddaughter, nurturer, care-taker, house-keeper, cook, whore, entertainer? Will the world ever be able to?

Will she be able to perceive her self through filters other than those of fair, dark, fat, thin, short, tall, beautiful, ugly, black, white, yellow, brown? Will the world ever be able to?

Will she ever be considered a human being, with human wants, wishes, feelings, failings, without the halo or stain?

Will she ever be considered more than a means to an end- getting a male heir? More than a womb whose job it is to cater to the propogation of the (ironically) human race?

Will she ever be able to reclaim her right to her body, her thoughts, her feelings, her wishes, her life?

Will she ever be able to live a happy and fulfilling life on her own terms without everyone and their cousin attempting to control her choices?

Will her life be ever considered more important than any ideology?

31 year old Savita Halappanavar died a painful and unnecessary death in Ireland after being denied proper medical care. Her story is known to all by now. Her baby had already miscarried, and she was dealing with the heartbreak in a practical way- asking for a termination of the pregnancy as her life was in danger. She died a long and protracted, extremely painful death. An entirely preventable death. An immeasurable loss for her family- her parents and her husband. What kind of upholding of religion did this achieve? She did not even share that belief.

Both Praveen and Savita Halappanavar lost their baby. Only Savita lost her life.

She was born a woman.

Is this the kind of world into which I've brought my daughter?

I couldn't put my wish and hope for a better world for our daughters in words any different from these by a favourite poet, Rabindranath Tagore-

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee 
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

Poetry, as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.

RIP, Savita Halappanavar.

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This was a post hankering to be written. Savita's story was just the catalyst.

They are children too!

Link here for CSA Awareness Month blog

Childhood. The concept of childhood as we understand is a pretty recent one.

In the middle ages, in a world where the same occupations were practiced through generations, children were considered an asset. More hands to work- either in the house or at business.

Now children then were considered as babies till the grand young age of 7-8 yrs. After that, they were supposed to be able to work, and assigned small or big tasks, and were considered miniature adults.

This led to a very strange situation, where, without a proper understanding of how children's minds and body works and develops, there was also this belief that these miniature adults were somehow repositories of evil that had to be purged of it. This was especially true during the adolescent years, when the hormonal changes made these poor kids behave in a way not keeping with the way reasonable grown-ups should. They were also attributed a sexuality extrapolated from an adult perspective, inevitably leading to sexual exploitation. 

All this may seem very far-fetched, but these were the times when anybody with any unusual characteristics or behaviour was wont to be branded a witch and burnt at the stake. People were regularly given the death sentence (the drawn and quartered types) or put in dungeons and forgotten for even minor misdemeanours. Interpretation of the law depended upon the whims and fancies of the current monarch. The dark ages.

With the advent of the Industrial revolution, things went from bad to worse. Children were now hired out by families to factories and workhouses that made profit from the cheap labour they provided.  

This does not apply just to the western world. In most places the world over, it was the same story, with variations of culture.

All this put children out there where they were more vulnerable. With this kind of imbalance of power, these children were open to all kinds of abuse, including sexual abuse. 

It is not that abuse did not happen in the home or family- it always has happened, and it has always been kept veiled to a large extent, especially in societies that put a large premium on that nebulous factor called honour. It is just that, children involved in organized labour were more at risk, much like street children are. Especially if there wasn't much awareness of their rights.

This still true in these enlightened times wherever there is child labour- domestics like in the developing countries, children employed in factories like in Sivakasi, children recruited for combat purposes in many war-torn nations. This article on frequently asked questions quotes from the UNICEF:

"Child soldiers perform a range of tasks including participation in combat, laying mines and explosives, scouting, spying, acting as decoys, couriers or guards, training, drill or other preparations, logistics and support functions, portering, cooking and domestic labour, and sexual slavery or other recruitment for sexual purposes." (Read trafficking)

These children, too have a right to a childhood. Happily, we have come a long way from the middle ages in terms of an understanding of this wonderful period of life. We have to collectively as a society now see that every child gets it.

So, yes, protect your own children from sexual abuse, make them aware of this scourge, prepare them to protect themselves. Teach them about recognising aberrant behaviour on the part of ANYONE - known or unknown, about good touch, bad touch.

At the same time, do speak up about anything that might lead to such a situation, whether in the private or public sphere. A drive such as CSA Awareness Month is a small first step in global awareness. Please do your bit to join in however you can.

Violence against Women Awareness Month

Violence against Women. It has a universal ring to it- be it physical or emotional violence. It does not matter if the women are white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, young or old. The story is the same all over.

A group of women have decided to speak up against it, and October has been earmarked for an awareness campaign about Violence against Women.

Link to VAWM blog

The team is cognizant with the fact that the subject of violence against women is very huge and includes multiple aspects. To ensure that this awareness campaign is effective, the scope is limited to the following aspects….

1. Domestic violence – Physical violence against the woman by husband/partner and other family members

2. Violence against girl child including deprivation

3. Sexual violence - including marital rape, date rape

4. Emotional/psychological abuse

5. Dowry related violence including Bride Burning

6. Female Infanticide

7. Acid attacks

We would be delighted to have your support for VAWM Oct 2011. The plan is similar to CSA April 2011. We have a blog (http://www.vawawareness.wordpress.com/) on Violence Against Women where we invite guest posts, expert posts and anon survivor stories.

We also would urge bloggers to post on this topic on the blog all through October, first announcing the awareness campaign and second, posting on any aspect of this topic they feel strongly about.

We also have a twitter handle (@VAWMonth) which will tweet information about VAWA and invite experts, NGOs, counsellors, etc to take questions.

Do let us know if you would be interested in participating, and how would you like to participate. Also, if you have any leads to NGOs or organisations you think we should partner with do let us know.

The email to write in to is vawawareness@gmail.com.

Do post about this initiative on your blog, and use the above image to link to the VAWM blog. Also, if possible, do put the link up on your side bar. Help to spread the word.

I will, of course, be sticking to reviewing a few books that are related to the topic, some written by experts and some by survivors. Some may even be fiction.

I am painfully aware, of course, that for every survivor who has come out with her story, there will be thousands who are facing violence mutely every day, some of them with scars that last a lifetime, and many thousands for whom the violence proves fatal- either the way of homicide or suicide.

There may be millions more who may not be actively facing violence in its injurious form, but being discriminated against for the simple fact of being born a woman-- little, piffling things that can eat away at one's self-esteem, not having real choices, and being criminalised for the choices that they do make from the ones left to them. All of which can have debilitating repurcussions, preventing them from ever being able to tap their full potential. Something that is commonplace in most homes. Subliminal violence, I would call it. Insidious, and all the more dangerous for that.

I would like to share this, too. Yesterday, I was sitting in my usual place near the children's play area in my complex, reading a book that I mean to review. A lady from the complex, with whom I was on just a nodding aquaintance, came by and showed interest in the book I was reading. When I told her about this initiative, she came up with a surprising (actually not so surprising) question. According to her, the women who have any access at all to a blogpost were women with at least some priviledges. How does this 'armchair variety of awareness' help the common woman? Does it seriously have a trickle-down effect? Even if there is, isn't the change too slow to be of any significance? And for all the apparent awareness about these problems, aren't the papers everyday full of just such cases?

Any answers?

Book Review - THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE: Voices from the Partition of India

Pic courtesy flipkart.com

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE
Voices from the Partition of India
Written by Urvashi Butalia
Published by Penguin Books
1998.

Urvashi Butalia, the writer, has impressive credentials. Along with Ritu Menon, she set up Kali for Women, the first feminist press in India, in 1984, and later, Zubaan Books. Born to in Ambala, India, to parents who were refugees from West Punjab, now in Pakistan, she grew up hearing stories of  the Partition, which tore apart the Indian subcontinent at the time of its freedom from British rule.

She began her research as a process of making sense of her family's personal tragedy. One thing led to another, and over time she realised that what 'history' tells us of the Partition are the bare political facts: tales of warring political parties and the British involvement in the whole gory process, the loss of property and lives, the statistics of the largest mass migration in recent history and violence in the riots between the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs caught in the unfortunate event.

There was not much data on the renting apart of the closely enmeshed fabric of society and the actual sufferings of the flesh-and-blood people caught in the crossfire. The feminist in her also became aware of the huge conspiracy of silence (this term has also been used in reference to the victims of that other regrettable horror of the same time, the Holocaust) that enfolded the suffering of those considered to be of 'not much account' and therefore on the margins of citizenry- the women, the children and the harijans.

"But the 'history' of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that led up to it. These other aspects - what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we may call the 'human dimensions' of this history -- somehow seemed to have a 'lesser' status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture 'factually.' Yet, could it be that they had no place in the history of Partition? Why, then, did they live on so vividly in individual and collective memory?"

Ms Butalia takes us through these events as pieced together from first-person accounts of survivors. The stories seem fantastic, the violence, the bloodiness ant the loss inexplicable, as does the almost mythological account of a society where the different religions had lived together in harmony, love and trust. Surely something had gone seriously wrong somewhere for the anger to have erupted as it had, killing and maiming millions, and creating a legacy of communal disharmony, and an almost pathological enmity between the two countries which were once part of one whole. A whole that had effectively driven their colonial rulers away.

The feminist in the writer notes some very interesting aspects of the problem. Even the interviews were necessarily taken in a family setting, where men did most of the talking, and women were often silenced. While men spoke of the politics, the killings, the violence, the women's experience of Partition was largely defined by the death of children, abductions, sexual violence, honour killings, forcible co-habitation/marriages with their abductors, their making peace with it, especially after children were born of these relationships.

During their interviews, Ms Butalia tried to listen to the unsaid, the silences, the sudden breaking-off of the narrative, the nuances. "In my work, the more I looked at women's voices and found them inserting themselves into the text, the more I realised that the silences did not exist only around women, but also around others, those whose silences have been even less important to society. The search for a history of women was what then led me to a search for a history of others. The voices of women, of children, of untouchables, to me provide not only a different perspective on the history of Partition, but they also establish this history as a process, a continuing history, which lives on in our lives today in a variety of ways." 

Then there was the ultimate insult to injury- the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949. A lot of this has been pieced together from accounts of social workers who were actively involved in the operation. Ostentiably to recover abducted women and children and return them to their families, the Act would not take into account the women's choice in the matter, something that all citizens were given upto the late fifties. After being abducted, these women often got assimilated into those families, bore children out of those relationships, but were torn from these children when they were 'recovered' to return to their families of origin. The original families would often refuse to accept these 'children of sin' which were left with their abductor-fathers. Quite often these children ended up on the streets with the other children who had been displaced or orphaned in the Partition. Both the women and children were refused the 'choice' that citizens of both countries had at the time.

First-hand accounts by some of these children, adults at the time of interviewing, underscore the same conspiracy of silence. Many of them glossed over their accounts, unable as adults to relate their memories of the horrors. Some of them, like a Sikh survivor who was just 9 at the time of Partition, had memories overshadowed by one particular incident- the death of their own familiy's hands of almost a hundred girls and women to 'save' their honour - an incident immortalised in the book and later movie Tamas.

In fact, most of these personal stories have been found to a large extent in a multitude of short stories and novellas written by many noted authors who have lived through the Partition- Amrita Pritam (Pinjar), Saadat Hasan Manto (Toba Tek Singh, Kingdom's End and other stories), Gulzar (Raavi Par and other stories), Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan), Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice-Candy Man), Bhisham Sahni (Tamas), and more. Many of these stories have been made into film, reaching a larger audience. Many bollywood movies, too, speak of the Partition or 'Batwara' as it is called in Hindi.

History, as told in history books, however, sticks mostly to the bare facts and statistics of the Partition. 'The other side of silence' tries to address this deficit in a more factual way, that can be corroborated, than the fictionalised accounts. Showing us that the fiction is not a very long way off reality.

More than twelve million people left their roots and migrated, about ten million of these crossing the western border. Around two million died in the violence. An estimated  75,000-1,00,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). An estimated 50,000 children were born to the abducted women, an an unaccounted number of children were abandoned or simply lost. "People travelled in buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot in great columns called kafilas, which could stretch for dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 400,000 people, refugees travelling east to India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route."

Ms Butalia has very honestly admitted that her work does not represent the whole of the history of Partition, but is a very personal history, her reading of the interviews she took. She also candidly admits that it is probably a very one-sided view of the whole thing, as by 1984, when she began her research, it was no longer possible to obtain access to those on the other side of the border, and cautions communal groups from using her research to reach their ends.

Here are some more excerpts from the book.

Am entering this book in the 2011 South Asian Reading Challenge at S.Krishna's books.

Review: Oranges in no man's land

Pic courtesy books.google.com

Oranges in no man's land
Written by Elizabeth Laird
Illustrated by Gary Blythe
Published by  Macmillan Children's Books
Ages 8-12 years.

10 yr old Ayesha lives with her mother, grandmother and two brothers in Civil war torn Beirut. Her mother gets killed by a bomb that also destroys their home, and they become refugees living in a shelter. Here Ayesha makes a friend, the deaf-mute girl her age, Samar. Life goes on, her grandmother their only parent.

Until one day, her grandmother becomes seriously ill. She has been ill for a long time now, and had medicines that she took for it, given to her by Dr Leila, for whom she had worked for many years. But now her medicines are over, and Dr Leila lives beyond the Green line, on the other side of the divide, beyond the 'no man's land' that lies between their portion of the city and hers.

So what is a mere 10 yr old to do? Does she manage to go to the good doctor and get medicines for her grandmother? How does she get past the armed solders gaurding the entrances to both sides and come back unscathed?

This is a touching story written by Elizabeth Baird, who lived in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War which stretched from 1975-1990. It is based on some real life events and experiences, as she writes in her preface to the book.

The story brings home to us the fact that there are both good and bad people on both sides of any divide, and the common man usually wishes for peace, not war, so that normal life can go on. And that a war usually serves the few in power, with vested interests.

The sketch of Ayesha, running swiftly for all it's worth, looking furtively at something in the distance that she probably needs to be wary of, is a repeated motif throughout the book, at the title of each chapter. Done by Gary Blythe, (illustrator of other well known books like The Whale's Song, Rumer Godden's Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and Michael Morpurgo's I believe in Unicorns) they lend a sense of urgency to the books.

Crossposted at Saffrontree.

I am entering this book at the Reading The World Challenge 2011 over at Papertigers, for A. Under Fiction, Lebanon.

Book Review: DARBY



Pic courtesy flipkart

DARBY
Written by Jonathon Scott Fuqua
Published by Candlewick Press
Ages 9-12 yrs

Darby Carmichael is a white, 9 yr old girl living in Bennettsville, Marlboro county, South Carolina, in the racially intolerant early 1920s. She has two "best friends", Beth at the all-white school, and Evette Robinson, the girl who stays on the farm next door, the daughter of a black sharecropper. Darby looks forward to coming home from school everyday, so that she can just run off to play with Evette. Given a choice, of course, Darby would choose Evette over all her other friends, but even at 9, she knows that it cannot be done.

Darby's dream is to be a newpaper journalist, and she attempts to write for the local daily, helped to a large extent by Evette with whom she discusses her ideas, and who edits her work. This is accepted by Mr Salter, the editor of the Bennettsville Times, who is a friend of her father's. Of course, he knows all about Evette's role in this, but does not say anything, as he, along with Darby's father, is anti racial sentiment.

Darby gets better and better in her writing (with Evette's help of course), and soon has an article appearing in the daily every week, her family and friends making much of it! So when she witnesses the beating up of Evette's brother for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, by Turpin Dunn, a white man who she knows her father despises for his ill-manners and bad-tempered behaviour, and who her father knows is a member of the dreaded Klu Klux Klan, she proceeds to write about it. Fully knowing the furore this would cause, her father permits the daily to publish it.

What happens next? How is the following drama played out? Does right prevail in the end?

A wonderful book about the battle of right against wrong, about an innate sense of equality present in a child's mind, in a first person version of a 9 yr old on the "priviledged" side of racial segregation. A coming of age book, a journey from wide-eyed innocence to the slow dawning of a knowledge of reality, and the courage to stand up for what one thinks is right.

The book reminded me strongly of a well loved favourite-To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, reviewed here- and could be said to be along similar lines.

A good book to follow up this wonderful book reviewed by Meera on ST. A book in honour of Black History Month.

Crossposted at Saffrontree and at Bookreviews.

About Human Rights and Freedom

This post is partly a rant, so bear with me.

A took part in a drawing-painting competition on the occasion of Independence Day. The topic was Freedom. A coloured the whole page in the colours of the tricolour, drew a map of India, inside which she drew birds flying out of a cage, and children playing. Below the painting, she wrote the caption: FREE TO DREAM. I am not sure about the merits of her painting in terms of a painting competition, but I give her full marks for the spirit that she wanted to convey.

• But then, are we truly free to dream?
• Aren't we limited by our beliefs, societal norms and beliefs, conditioning within families, etc?
• How many of us really realize our true potential?
• How many of us have access to realising it?
• And how many actually dare to dream about it?
• We live in a democracy, which by its very definition should grant us this freedom, but does it really happen?
• And how many of us are even aware of something being amiss?
• Do we even get our fundamental rights as citizens of a free democracy?
• Our Human Rights by virtue of being human beings? 
• What do even know about human rights?
• Do we know what they are?
• What do you say to children who are pulled out of school and made to work for a living?
• What do you say to victims of domestic violence who have no refuge with either the society they have to live in, nor the government who just makes noises about bringing in laws, but does zilch about implementing them in a way that ensures the dignity of the victim?
• What do you say to the victims of khap panchayats and fatwas issued by religious leaders?
• What do you say to your everyday human being who is denied his/her feelings and aspirations to just be a human being without being deitified or demonised?

So many questions. They could go on. While everyday the newspapers are full of stories of incidents of blatant breach of these human rights.

An awareness of  rights of human beings has been an integral part of human history. All great religions and great civilisations have pondered upon the question, and come up with their own guidelines. It is a different matter, though, what their definition of a human being was. So some people were more equal than the others, and enjoyed more rights. A situation that continues to this day, at least in the minds of people with vested interest in this mindset, universal laws and local laws notwithstanding.

A renewed interest, and the motivation to list human rights, and to put in place a mechanism to regulate their enforcement came into being only after WW2. The Holocaust, that blot on the 20th century, was in direct contravention to a belief in human rights. Post-war, in the Nuremberg trials, the world was made aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, and the United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, with a goal to promoting and ensuring "respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."  India became a member on 30th October, 1945

The UN then formulated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was formally brought into force on 10th December, 1948. The preamble of this gives us the reasons why such a declaration is necessary, and then goes on to list 30 articles stating the rights.

AI logo
courtesy wikipedia

Amnesty International was established in 1961 to regulate the implementation of human rights. As wikipedia puts it, "AI draws attention to human rights abuses and campaigns for compliance with international laws and standards. It works to mobilise public opinion to exert pressure on governments that perpetrate abuses."

I happened to read two different books published in association with Amnesty International. One is a picture book for children. The other is a story covering many generations, many continents, many people, many beliefs, many situations, many individual stories, and yet with a link between them.

The first is a book published by Tara books in India in association with Amnesty International, and under licence from  Frances Lincoln Children's Books. Cover page image taken here is of the original  international edition. No image is available for the Tara Books edition, which is, however, available at bookstores and at Flipkart.

Image courtesy AI

WE ARE ALL BORN FREE

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures

Published by Tara books.

Ages: Can be read by ages 8+, but as it says, "it is for children from the sge of 12 onwards that this book offers the maximum rewards."

It is in essense the same as the international edition, except for a foreword and an afterword with a note for Parents and Educators by V. Geetha and Gita Wolf of Tara books. These give us an idea of how the book may be used, the concept of Human Rights, the history of the UN and this declaration, and its relevance locally, in the Indian context. There is also a discussion on how the illustrations can be interpreted in the context of the Article that they highlight. And how this can be applied to what we see around us.

The Articles themselves are worded in a simpler, more child friendly and more identifiable terms.

For eg., Article 1 & 2 state:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty."

This is stated in the book as: 

We are all born free and equal.

We all have our own thoughts and ideas.
We should all be treated in the same way.

These rights belong to everybody,
Whatever our differences.

The book is a collage of sorts, with 30 internationally acclaimed artists known for their illustrations in children's books and picture books contributing. I was delighted to find old favourites like John Birmingham, Polly Dunbar, Nicholas Allan, Axel Scheffler, Bob Graham, Chris Riddell and Marcia Williams.

They are from all corners of the globe- UK, Sweden, Argentina, South Africa, France, Austria, Japan, Canada, Zimbabwe, USA, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Ireland. This makes the book a wonderful opportunity to study their various styles too. The illustrations are full page, sometimes double spread.

I think that this is one of those books that should be introduced to everyone. The one negative point is its price, which at Rs 240, is not very affordable. But surely, each school can have a copy? Maybe it can be brought out in a more affordable edition without the high quality paper that this one uses, but retaining all the other features?

Take a look at this video for a good look inside the book.

The second book is also a collage of sorts, with ten established writers writing one chapter each. We are introduced to the main characters in the first chapter, and the rest take off from there.

CLICK
Written by: Refer to cover page picture for the whole list.
Published by Scholastic Children's books.
Ages: 13+

Image Courtesy Amazon

Have you ever seen a picture, a photograph and wondered about it? If there were some story behind the person in it, the place it had been taken at, the situation it had been taken in, the reasons for taking it?

George "GEE" Keane is a photographer of international acclaim, who specialises in photographs of human interest. In his quest, he goes where an everyday person might not go: where there is war, famine, imprisonment, torture, as also where there is beauty and peace. He goes to all parts of the world in the process, and meets many people- extraordinary and ordinary.

In the first chapter Gee is dead, and has left behind for his 14 yr old grand-daughter Maggie a handcrafted wooden box with seven compartments, each with a distinctive shell from a different continent, with the instructions: Throw them all back. And for his 17 yr old grand-son his camera and a packet of original photographs signed by their subjects.

The story goes to all corners of the world from there. It goes to the past, the future and also lingers in the present. We meet

• prisoners in a Soviet prison at the height of the Cold War, 
• people mutilated by and children affected by war in their backyard, and reclaiming their human dignity, 
• a young girl struggling against her feelings of guilt as a victim-was there some way she could have prevented what happened- and finding closure, 
• a single mother caring for an epileptic child and struggling to make ends meet,
• a young boy meeting his idol Muhammad Ali by chance,
• a young girl finding discovering a life-long quest and finding solace in it after losing a loved family member,
• and much more. 

The beauty of the book is also to be found in the uncanny way that the different stories link across continents, across differing situations and across many decades. Maggie, whom we meet in the first chapter as a 14 yr old, is an old lady, Margaret, on a quest in the last, handing over the baton to her grown-up grand-niece, Iona.

Speaking to her, Margaret says, "He wanted us to see. That was his legacy. He gave his grandson- your grandfather-a camera, and he gave me a set of shells. Jason took the camera, and took off- his life took off. He saw through the lens. He learnt to adjust the aperture, to see as keenly as the instrument allows. I took the shells and I took off too, and wandered the world, and saw what came my way. That's all we ever want to give away, you know. Not really ourselves, not even our genes. Just our hopes that the young will remember to look, and to see. Through whatever means possible." 

This book is also published in association with Amnesty International. In an afterword by AI, it is written: "Human Rights are why the authors of CLICK could write this book. Human Rights mean you can read it. In some countries people are imprisoned and even tortured for expressing their ideas in writing or for daring to support Amnesty International. You could even be imprisoned for reading a book like this."

Here are two of my favourite songs in the same spirit. One is a quiet solo number. The other is again a collage of sorts. A musical one.  This is one A enjoys listening to, too. You too enjoy.

Crossposted here.