Being a children’s writer in the age of Xbox

Let me clarify something at the very outset. Being a children’s writer — in whatever age, place, time, season — is, to me at least, the funnest thing in the world. Period. I suspect you would get similar answers from any other children’s writer that you asked. If we didn’t think that, if we didn’t believe it with all our hearts, we would not be doing what we do.

Having said that, does the 21st century present some particularly unique challenges to children’s writers? Are certain computer games really creating a generation of violent psychopaths? Are children today really reading less than we did? Is the death of human imagination — which happens, so the doomsayers tell us, from watching television —really nigh?

Of course there are distractions. But was there ever a time when there were no distractions? Today’s Wii was yesterday’s cricket game, today’s Dress-Up-Barbie website was yesterday’s ‘house-house’. Some computer games do involve violence, but to get some perspective on violence in books, I recommend reading the Amar Chitra Katha comics’ Ganesha or Krishna out to a five-year-old. A father lops off his son’s head, an uncle smashes his new-born nephews to the ground, a legion of superhuman adults takes on a defenceless boy, a nephew kills his uncle.

These, and other stories like these, were the beloved companions of our own childhoods.

As to whether children are reading less today, I don’t think so. If anything, they are reading more. Our parents asked us to put away our ‘story books’ and concentrate instead on our school books, fearful that if we did not take our places at the high tables of engineering and medicine, the dung heap was where we would end up.

Today, thousands of well-educated and comfortably-off parents, confident that the country’s future, and by extension their children’s, is wonderfully rosy, are not only urging their children to read but digging deep to buy (or download) books from the vast and varied smorgasbord of writers, styles and genres now available to them (we, if you remember, had little beyond British and Russian books).

I am always amused when people talk of books versus television as if they were monolithic entities. After all, there is such a thing as a good television programme just as there is such a thing as a trashy book. The best programmes on television entertain, tell heart-warming stories, and open up new and exciting ways of looking at the world in much the same way that the best books do.

And, ironically enough, quite often, they bring children back to books. I know of children who began to read when books featuring their favourite hero — Chhota Bheem — came out, and children who, post the movie, dug out their parents’ dog-eared sets of Tintin comics to get better acquainted with the boy reporter. About the accusation that television kills imagination? J K Rowling, one of the best-selling children’s authors of all time, and a fantasy writer to boot, grew up in the television age.

So here’s the verdict. Through the years, the challenge for children’s writers and storytellers — to write or tell a story that is compelling enough to draw children — the most discerning, demanding, and ruthless audience in the world away from their other occupations and into a fictional world of possibilities — has remained unchanged.

If the challenge hasn’t changed, the same is not true of its flip side. Today, an entire new universe of opportunities lies open before us. The opportunity to connect with individual readers. The opportunity to hear what they think of your book, (and young readers don’t pull their punches!) the day after your book is released. The opportunity to be available to readers anytime, anywhere, through their favourite playthings — the phone, the tablet, the electronic reader, the computer. The opportunity to bypass traditional publishing routes and get your stories direct to your readers. The opportunity to tell stories of hope — and they must ALWAYS be stories of hope — to the best audience in the world, in a million new ways.
The best of times, then? You bet.

Roopa Pai is the author of Taranauts, India’s first fantasy-adventure series for children.