by Arianna Sethi, Grade 10
Aparna Kapur’s Masterclass ‘Shifting Perspectives’ at the Neev Literature Festival 2025, highlights the importance of how different perspectives work together and enhance a story.
In her book An Absence of Squirrels, the main character is a 12-year-old girl named Katli, who has seven different personalities, with different thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. The author demonstrated how a shift in perspectives changes the focus, and colours the way a story is told. However, perspectives are more powerful with context. Without context, there can be a variety of meanings, some of them being something you may not want to convey.
The masterclass was interactive, interesting, and magical. The audience intently listened to the different perspectives of Katli, seeing how they slowly change and evolve. Katli’s perspectives evoked 3 words from the children in the audience: empathy, imagination, and creativity.
The session got us to think about analysing different visuals, and extracting numerous perspectives from them. What might characters other than Katli be thinking? What does the moment look like? What would you do in this situation? In the end, Aparna Kapur’s island-set book An Absence of Squirrels, along with the amazing interactions and activities that followed, helped us understand the art of shifting perspectives.
