Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Hopping Pot is a postscript to Harry Potter but the magic is there, in Aesop doses
The story behind the story is that The Tales of Beedle the Bard is left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore 8220;in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive8221;. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Granger feels slighted by this gift of fairy tales, a small, frayed book with titles in runes and binding stained and peeling, while Ron Weasley gets the Deluminator and Harry Potter receives the Golden Snitch. Surely, Dumbledore could have trusted her intelligence with something more important. He did, fairy tales require much more than common sense to be understood, and appreciated. Perhaps that is why J.K. Rowling ends the Harry Potter series with a slim volume of stories for wizard children: there are certain lessons that you simply can8217;t learn well enough.
The five tales in the book are straightforward in their values: goodness is rewarded and wickedness is punished. While 8220;The Wizard and the Hopping Pot8221; is about a wizard who did not want to use his magic to help his neighbours till his cooking pot forces him to, 8220;The Fountain of Fair Fortune8221; tells us about Asha, Altheda and Amata who unwittingly labour their way to a fountain that possesses no magical qualities. More than the stories themselves, the real treasure of the book is 8220;Dumbledore8217;s personal notes8221; for every story. With his characteristic insight and humour, he recounts the origin of each story, the history of the wizarding kind and how the Tales have survived several attempts to be destroyed or rewritten by Beatrix Bloxam in Toadstool Tales, a series of children8217;s books 8220;banned in the wizarding world because they have been found to cause nausea, sometimes to the point of actual vomiting8221;.
The reader8217;s major gripe will be directed towards the publishers, who have not only been frugal with the illustrations but have also unrealistically priced the 107-page, triple-spaced book at Rs 599. Perhaps the publishers wanted to reiterate the fact that some of life8217;s most important lessons come for a price.
