Haiku, art & tales at Day 1 of Bookaroo

Saturday saw a range of activities at Mount Litera School International in Bandra-Kurla Complex on the first day of Bookaroo-children's literature festival. Twenty sessions were conducted for hundreds of kids.

Under the Kahani Tree folktales came to life with as author Karishma Mahbubani enacted stories for children aged between four and six. The crowd was also enthralled by multilingual storytelling at Qissebaazi with actor-director Padma Damodaran. She told stories set against the music of African drums called Djame. There was a space for art at the Doodle Wall where illustrator Kavitha Mandana shared quick tricks to draw different kinds of animals.

At illustrator Priya Kuriyan's 'My City', children sketched out their idea of Mumbai. Six-year-old Samaira Jotwani of Jamnabai Narsee School doodled away her house, a bunny and a cat.

Words found a place in Haiku. Poet Kala Ramesh taught pre-teens how to 'show' with words and the importance of nature in Haiku.

Animation comes to life

Storyteller Kailash Waghmare’s story that beautifully weaved in tribal communities and forests, left the children in awe. The animated way in which Waghmare depicted the forest area clubbing it with the funny sounds that he created, sent the kids on a laughter riot. While this session took children in the land of forest, Irish poet and writer John Dougherty used his guitar to create some musical magic with some humour, and left the kids bemused. His song “There are not enough songs about under pants and I really think there should be more” saw an uproar of laughter. His song went on to say m how knickers are frilly, tight and with different colours. What followed while the song (no surprises), were ‘what!’ ‘no way’ and whole lot of laughter.

Doodling away realism

Priya Kurian, the children’s book illustrator let the kids explore their creativity independently in her one hour doodling session themed ‘My City’. The kids doodled away their perceptions of the city they live in on the horizontally spread paper wall. While a lot of them stuck to doodling the sea, marine drive, buildings, trees, their favourite food and more, there were two doodles that stood out - a factory emitting smoke and a comparison table depicting land with trees and no trees, cars emitting smoke and non polluted and polluted water. Interestingly the doodle of the polluted water had streaks of black scribbled on the blue covering the fish. These drawings depict the environmental awareness that kids these days have developed. They know their surroundings well and can very easily identify the rapid changes happening in the environment they live in. For their age, they have quite a heightened sense of what’s harmful to the nature and what’s not.