By Samarrah Sivakumar, Grade 10, and Kaavya Sahi, Grade 9
In the opening session of Neev Literature Festival 2024, historians Devika Cariapa and Manu Pillai reminisced, like old friends, about their relationships with books and stories, taking us along on the journey.
As the two authors recounted stories from their childhood, the audience was treated to humorous anecdotes from both. Manu shared that his love for reading was sparked by an unfortunate incident where he accidentally set fire to his father’s stack of corrected answer papers. In the aftermath, his older sister—an avid reader—gave him a book in the hope that her hyperactive brother would be occupied with a less destructive activity. The rest, as they say, is history.
Devika recalled an itinerant childhood spent in a series of small towns in North India, amidst National Book Trust publications, beautifully produced Russian children’s books, and British staples like Enid Blytons. This reflected in her schoolwork, which featured babbling brooks and marmalade and scones, despite her immediate environment being marked by dust storms and locust swarms.
The two authors talked about reading comics like The Archies and Tinkle. When Devika asked if comics were ever forbidden in his house, Manu replied in the negative: “Our parents produced us and let us grow like fungus on a wall, not policing what we read.” Manu attributed his rapid growth as a reader to this complete freedom he was granted to read any book that came his way.
The authors also acknowledged the fact that they grew up in a different era, one that was “slower and had fewer distractions,” and they didn’t have a lot of options to entertain themselves. Children these days, however, live in the age of social media, with entire worlds at their fingertips and prone to distraction. This has been a persistent concern for parents and educators alike. However, Manu cautioned against viewing Books vs. Social Media as “some sort of an eternal battle”, saying that as long as we maintain a healthy balance between the two, there is no cause for alarm.
Manu and Devika then explored how their reading journeys shaped their writing approaches as historians. They noted how history, as a subject, has the reputation of being dry and boring. However, thanks to his grandmother’s matter-of-fact approach to narrating anecdotes from their family history, Manu grew up seeing history as “a textured thing”, not as a set of facts and figures to be memorised. Devika, who majored in archaeology, said she wanted to celebrate Indian historical sites, to tell “stories from stones.” These factors led to their shared commitment to using the power of storytelling to make history interesting and accessible for non-academic audiences.
The session might have opened under a gray and cloudy sky, yet it was lively. We saw people around us of all ages, all equally interested in the talk. Each face seemed to reflect their reading journey. Perhaps some, like Devika Cariapa and Manu Pillai, were born into a world with no technological distractions, while others, like me, were born into a world where technology is ever-present in every aspect of our lives. Yet in that moment, we were all connected by a shared love for books and the joy they bring us—a joy that will continue to do so when we are older. As Devika rightly stated, “Humans have created a world which they have navigated through a compass of words.”
