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Journalism of Courage
School has started and you are already snowed under reading lists and text books that have to be memorised. Well, learning is not always a punishment and reading can be made easy on the eye.
Take a look at Amar Chitra Katha. Around for decades, it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with your history. Launched in the late ’60s, primarily to acquaint children with the great Indian mythologies, Amar Chitra Kathas have been translated in 38 languages of the world. There are 436 comics in all, of which Krishna has been the best seller over the years with a sale of 11.5 lakh copies.
Over all sales of comics under the Amar Chitra Katha banner added up to 76 million copies till the year 1987.
To ensure that those numbers keep rising The Indian Express and Amar Chitra Katha got together to organise a `Summer Bonanza Contest’ for school kids. Held in 25 centres in Mumbai, over 5,000 students from all over the city participated in the event.
But for most winners the thing they cherished most were still their copies of Amar Chitra Kathas. Says the first prize winner of the quiz contest (junior group), Srikant Ramachandran, "I read Amar Chitra Kathas regularly. I like the stories in it very much. They are so interesting that I don’t give the copies away. I keep them all. I love reading about the heroes of Mahabharat."
Even as the Marathi children’s magazine Kishore, completes 25 years of existence, its readers can rediscover the treasure house in 15 selected volumes. The first volume in the series will hit the stands on August 15.
The project is significant as it is the first time children’s literature is being assimilated by the government’s textbook bureau. Each one of the volumes will cater to one form of literature. Personalities like Dyanpeeth award winner V V Shirwadkar, writer-playwright P L Deshpande and poet Vinda Karandikar have contributed to Kishore. One of the volumes caters to `Childhood of Great Personalities’. This section includes childhood accounts of Y B Chavan, N S Gore and Lata Mangeshkar.
