The youngest reporter and blogger on the team, Devaarsh Mehta attended a few of the CLF sessions for children in his age category (12+) at the Bangalore Literature Festival, Day 2. Find his take on these sessions that are specially designed for children to have fun and also take home a lesson or two.
The Grass is Red on The Other Side
Gautam Benegal is a great illustrator. He showed us many of his illustrations in different books and how he uses a different style in each book. He then told us that solitude is essential for ideating. Too many sights and sounds can make the imagination blind and deaf. Yet, if we focus we can even do art in hectic places. Use your fingers as a frame and capture a view, including the time and space in your mind’s eye (you can eve click a picture on your mobile) and then paint/draw it.
Talking Objects – The Museum as a Storyteller
In the museum, we saw many things like old royal fans, teapots, sugar holders, telephones, butter churners, graters, statues, pictures of weddings, masks, puppets, textiles and many pictures of the Ramayana in different mediums.
It was a lot of fun as we played many games such as guessing games, thinking games etc. I was a little sad in the end, as it had exceeded the time limit and had to be stopped.
Wonders & Visions – Why Science Fiction?
Vinayak Varma and Gautham Shenoy
This session was the one I enjoyed the most in my entire time at BLF. It was a talk on science fiction. The authors said that reading Sci-fi relaxes them as they can escape from the real world and jump into a world where anything is possible.
All good Sci-fi stories have different branches of science at their core. For example, zombies come from zombie ants, ants that are infected with a virus, which causes them to climb up a tree and commit suicide, because of which more viruses are released and this infects other ants.
Sci-fi stories also have this what-if-question. Like what if robots took over the earth or what if there is an alternate dimension, etc. Sci-fi stories breathe life into science and they are very different from fantasy stories as they are more in the realm of possibilities. About 30 years ago, having a cell phone would have been something out of a Sci-fi book. Come to think of it, tomorrow itself is Sci-fi because everything IS Sci-fi till it actually happens.
About the Author: Devaarsh Mehta is a certified bookworm, guitarist (almost), riddle maker, puzzle solver, and earth warrior with a huge collection of books in his personal library. He currently writes for TheSeer.