Tag: Books

Seventy Years of Making India Book-Minded: Celebrating the National Book Trust

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On August 1, 2026, the National Book Trust, India—better known to generations of readers simply as NBT—completed 70 years. Its purpose, from the beginning, was not merely to publish books but to create a nation of readers.

The country had just become independent barely a decade before. Literacy was expanding, education was becoming accessible to larger sections of society, and there was an urgent need for affordable, good-quality books in the many languages of India.

The answer, in part, was the National Book Trust.

Dr S. Radhakrishnan speaking at the Foundation Day of the National Book Trust, India, August 1, 1957, at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi. Also in pic, then-PM Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and then- Union Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

A Trust Born with a Simple but Ambitious Idea

The Government of India decided to establish the National Book Trust in 1957. Its foundation day is observed on August 1, and the Trust was inaugurated at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi by Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The idea was closely associated with Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of making knowledge and literature accessible beyond a small, privileged readership.

NBT was created with an unusually broad mandate: to encourage the production of good literature in English, Hindi and other Indian languages; make books available at moderate prices; prepare catalogues; organise book fairs and exhibitions; and, in the memorable language of its mandate, take steps to make people “book minded.”

That phrase—book minded—still captures the spirit of the organisation.

NBT was not conceived as just another government publishing house. It was intended to bridge the distance between the writer and the ordinary reader. It would publish classics and contemporary writing, encourage translations between Indian languages, bring important works from other languages to Indian readers, and popularise modern knowledge.

In other words, its ambition was democratic: good books should not be a luxury.

Seventy Years, Thousands of Books

Over the decades, NBT has built an extraordinarily wide and diverse catalogue. Its publications have ranged from fiction, poetry and biographies to science, social sciences, history, the environment, education and technology. It has published books for children and young readers, for neo-literates, and increasingly in tribal languages and popular dialects as well.

One of its most important contributions has been to India’s multilingual literary ecosystem. India is not one book market. It is many book worlds, linked by dozens of languages. A reader in Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi or Assamese should not have to remain confined to literature originally written only in that language.

Translation, therefore, has been central to the NBT idea.

The Trust’s mandate specifically includes publishing outstanding works of Indian authors and facilitating translation from one Indian language into another, as well as bringing significant foreign works to Indian readers.

This is a contribution that can easily be underestimated. Translation does more than move words from one language to another. It allows a Bengali reader to discover a Tamil writer, a Hindi reader to encounter Malayalam literature, or an English-language reader to enter literary traditions that might otherwise remain invisible.

In a multilingual democracy, translation is cultural bridge-building.

From the Book Exhibition to the World Book Fair

Publishing books, of course, is only half the task. Readers have to find them.

Here too, NBT played a pioneering role. Its first book exhibition was inaugurated in 1964 by Dr Radhakrishnan. Then came one of its best-known and most enduring achievements: the first World Book Fair, organised in 1972.

The New Delhi World Book Fair has since grown into one of India’s major cultural events. The 2026 edition, organised by NBT, brought together publishers, writers and readers on a truly international scale. Government sources reported more than 1,000 publishers representing 35 countries and over 600 events involving more than 1,000 speakers.

Books for Children, and Readers Yet to Be Made

NBT has also paid sustained attention to children. It organised its first Children’s Book Fair in Calcutta in 1983, and its publishing programme today includes a substantial range of books for young readers.

Its current catalogue under the Rashtriya Bal Pustakalaya includes titles in English and many Indian languages, from picture books and stories to books connected with science, nature, history and culture. Recent additions include books by established names as well as new writers, with prices that remain strikingly accessible.

This commitment to affordability may be one of NBT’s most important achievements. At a time when beautifully produced children’s books can cost several hundred rupees, an ₹50, ₹70 or ₹100 book can make the difference between a book being an occasional gift and becoming an everyday part of a child’s life.

And that, surely, was always the larger objective: not simply selling books, but building the habit of reading.

NBT in a Changing India

Seventy years after its birth, the book world has changed beyond recognition.

There are e-books, audiobooks, online stores, independent publishers, self-publishing platforms and social-media book influencers. Yet the original NBT mission has not become irrelevant. If anything, the need to help readers navigate an overwhelming flood of information has become greater.

The Trust has moved into new initiatives as well. It continues to organise book fairs and literary events, support reading promotion, train publishing professionals, participate in international fairs and encourage Indian writing and publishing, young authors’ mentorship initiative and the expanding Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya ecosystem.

Meanwhile, its catalogue continues to grow, ranging from the National Biography series and books on India’s freedom movement and knowledge traditions to contemporary themes, children’s literature and new bilingual publications.

Where Can You Buy NBT Books?

The easiest place to begin is the official NBT website. Its online catalogue allows readers to browse by language, format, subject and series, while the official store enables online purchase of available titles.

Browse and buy directly from NBT: National Book Trust online catalogue and store

For children’s books: NBT’s Rashtriya Bal Pustakalaya catalogue

The official catalogue is worth browsing even if you do not have a particular title in mind. That is perhaps the most NBT-like way of buying a book: wander through the shelves, discover something unexpected and come away with more than you intended.

After all, for 70 years, the National Book Trust has been doing more than publishing books. It has been quietly pursuing a much larger project: making books affordable, accessible and visible in a country of immense linguistic and cultural diversity.

That is no small achievement.

So, as NBT enters its eighth decade, perhaps the best way to mark its 70th birthday is not with a ceremonial message alone.

Buy a book.

And read it.

Because somewhere in the founding vision of the National Book Trust was a wonderfully simple hope: that India would become a little more book minded.

And something that our PM Nehru said at the launch of NBT is still true today: ‘If people who go to cinema, give one-tenth of the money they spend on cinema to books, you would have enormous number of books sold in India.”

–Meena

Pic: Source: National Book Trust, India, NBT at a Glance.

Wishing you a Green and Happy World Book Day

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Today is World Book Day. Oh Happy Day, Oh Happy Day!

It is a day that UNESCO, in 2001, declared for ‘a celebration to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. Each year, on 23 April, celebrations take place all over the world to recognize the scope of books – a link between the past and the future, a bridge between generations and across cultures.’

Why specifically April 23rd? Well, it seems that it is the date on which prominent authors William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Peruvian chronicler and writer) all died. A bit macabre, but well, there has to be some peg!

UNESCO and international organizations representing the three major sectors of the book industry – publishers, booksellers and libraries, select a World Book Capital each year. (New Delhi was the Book Capital in 2003, just two years after the concept came into being—looks like India had a stature and soft power even two decades ago!). The city of Strasbourg is UNESCO’s World Book Capital for 2024.

Book Days are usually marked with reading circles, events where people dress up as their favorite book characters, literary quizzes, book sales, author discussions, and various other innovative events to celebrate this most important of days.

The thought of book day prompted me to dig a little into a question that has been bothering me for a while. Are physical books more eco-friendly or e-books? Some research and calculations have been done, which say that:

‘.. one physical book has a climate impact of about 2.7kg CO2e*.’ 

‘And a Kindle e-reader has a climate impact of about 37.4kg CO2e per year.’ (Incidentally, text files are tiny, and the impact of downloading books is pretty close to negligible. The bulk of the e-book’s footprint is in the production and charging of the e-reader itself.)

‘So if you read 14 different books or more in one year, e-books have a lower footprint than physical books.

But if you only read a handful of books each year, physical books are the better option for you.’

(*CO2e: “Carbon dioxide equivalent” or “CO2e” is a term for describing different greenhouse gases in a common unit.)

As an educator, I want to children to read and read and read.  And I would much prefer that they read physical books. Since 14 is a ridiculously low number of books to read per year, we need to find ways to make physical reading greener. Here are some tips for ‘greener’ reading—for kids and adults:

Use libraries: Not for very young children, but beyond the age of 8 or so, children can get their reading dose from libraries. Thanks to the Delhi Public Mobile Library and my school library (Carmel Convent, New Delhi), supplemented by neighbourhood lending libraries during summer vacations, we got more than enough books. (In fact, we were allowed to purchase only one book a month, so that was the bonus and used as leverage in book exchanges.) Even today, I don’t buy too many books. I receive a lot of books as gifts, and am a faithful subscriber to Just Books!

Used books: Pre-loved books are a great way to go. Shops like Blossoms in Bangalore have some of the greatest selections.  And don’t hesitate to pass on books you have read to others who may find them of interest. Reach out to schools, colleges and educational institutions—they may welcome books you no longer have space for. You could also organize book-swaps.

Support green publishers: Buy books printedon 100% recycled paper, and create awareness about this aspect amonth other readers..

Happy Book Day! Happy Sustainable Reading!

–Meena

PS: The picture was taken ata library in Englands in the 1890s. The image is available at Getty’s Open Access Library.

Home and Homeland

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Despite having been a student as well a teacher of Political Science, I have never been able to grasp the complexities of the politics of the Middle East or West Asia. The convoluted conflict between Israel and Palestine has been going on for almost 75 years now, making headlines when there is an escalation or an extreme event, and smouldering in the background when another geo-political volcano erupts.

In the last two weeks two news related to this region made headlines. First was the horrific blast in Beirut that decimated a large part of the city and rendered tens of thousands homeless. The other was the announcement of an intention of a historic rapprochement between Israel and the UAE as a part of which Israel would give up its plan to annex the West Bank, the main territory of a state that the Palestinians want.

In other circumstances I would have noted, but not fully registered these two news items. However, quite coincidentally I have, in this same period, been reading a novel which is set in this region, and suddenly the context and the history took on a different dimension.IMG_20200819_105523

Mornings in Jenin is a poignant story of four generations of one family’s struggle and survival over sixty years of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The story which traverses from Jerusalem to Lebanon to America is told by Amal, a girl born to Arab parents in a refugee camp in Jenin; it traces the lives of her grandparents, herself, and her daughter.

As World War II raged in Europe in 1941, Amal’s  grandparents were living on their ancestral olive farm in the village of Ein Hod, not far from Bethlehem, in what was then Palestine. Their oldest son, Hasan, was best friends with a refugee Jewish boy, and the two were welcomed in each other’s homes. In May 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was proclaimed, and all the original inhabitants of the area were moved to the Jenin refugee camp. And this is where three subsequent generations lived, married, were born, and died.

The story follows Amal’s family as they live through a half century of violent history. It is not a political treatise, but the many interwoven stories, stretching backwards and forward in time, reveal what politics can do to ordinary people. It is a tale of hatred and fear, loss and pain, faith and hope. Above all is a saga of waiting—waiting to return to a lost home and homeland. Amidst the indignities and sufferings of these uprooted lives, there is also a tender celebration of family ties, the intensity of a mother’s love, sibling bonding, and enduring friendship.

It is also the story of Palestine from the time when it was a productive land of olive groves and proud self-sufficient inhabitants, through the 1948 War, the Occupation by Jews and conversion into the land of Israel, and the many Arab-Israeli wars from 1967, up to 2002.

Today we are so heavily bombarded with news (printed and audio visual) about conflict and displacement, all clubbed under the umbrella of ‘international humanitarian crises’ that we are either becoming inured, or choose to pretend that this does not concern us directly. For those of us who are fortunate and secure in our home and homeland we cannot imagine what it must be to be without a home nor homeland. As Amal describes “He [my brother] was denied, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated and exiled for the wish to possess himself and inherit the heritage bequeathed to him by history.” 

The novel is tagged as fiction, but the refugee camp of Jenin is real. The northernmost camp in the West Bank, it was set up in 1953 to house the displaced persons from the first Israeli takeover of territories in Jerusalem in 1948.  Over the years it was attacked several times by Israeli forces, and as lately as in 2002, it was the site of a terrible massacre. Even today Jenin camp has a population of about 14,000 residents cramped together in an area of 0.42 sq km.

Mornings in Jenin is written by Susan Abulhawa who was born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugees of the Six-Day-War of1967 war. She now lives in the USA. She is a human rights activist and founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO that advocates for Palestinian children’s right to play by building playgrounds in refugee camps in Lebanon. In 2002 she visited the refugee camp of Jenin and the book reflects real events.

While this book is “The story of one family, in an obscure village, visited one day by history that was not its own, and forever trapped by longing between roots and soil” it is a moving reminder that the faceless “humanitarian crisis” is made up of myriad individual human beings, each with their own personal life story, and common yearning for home and homeland.

–Mamata

 

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The BBC Connect

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I recently attended a thought-provoking talk by anthropologist and storyteller Gauri Raje on autobiographical storytelling and personal stories. Gauri, an old friend, now lives and works in the UK with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. For several years  Gauri has worked, through biographical storytelling, with ‘displaced people’ from many parts of the world–refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, seeking to start a new life in England. Through workshops involving story telling and story making, these people, uprooted from all that was familiar, in a precarious situation regarding their future in a strange and alien culture, were encouraged to tell  personal stories that they have never told in public. Gauri shared some of her many heart-rending, heart touching exchanges with these fragile people. The stories they shared were tales of incredible grit and resilience.

One of the stories was of a young Sudanese man who entered England as a stowaway clinging to the undercarriage of the Chunnel train. When the young man reported to the local police station where he had stepped onto English soil, he found that he could not understand the English that the police spoke. In an interesting aside to his story, he was emphatic that this was not at all like the English that he had heard spoken over the BBC radio that he listened to when he was in his home country!

While this revelation had its own impact (and that is another story!), it reminded me of a book I read a few months ago which, curiously, was based on another BBC connection. This was the true story of an unlikely friendship between a journalist with the BBC World Service in London and a Professor of English in war-battered Baghdad.

It began in 2005 when Bee Rowlatt, the journalist emailed May Witwit an Iraqi woman to confirm and prepare for a telephone interview about day-to-day life in Baghdad, and about her thoughts on the forthcoming elections there. May’s detailed and frank responses prompted more curiosity and questions from Bee, and a friendship developed between the two women. The “official BBC e-mail” planted the seeds of a correspondence that spanned from 2005-2008, with the two women sharing their news and thoughts about their work, family and life—at some levels-the social and political-poles apart, and yet so close in terms of shared emotions—despondency, depression, laughter and love.

The correspondence developed into a project to get May out of the dangerous and unhappy life in Iraq to seek asylum in Britain. The e-mails traces the challenges and travails in this venture—to gain asylum status and enough money to start a new life in a new land. Interestingly, here also the e-mail correspondence turned out to be key to this – its publication in book form helped to raise funds so May could prove that she had the financial support to come with her husband, to study in Britain.

The book is titled Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: the True Story of an Unlikely Friendship

 I am sure Gauri has facilitated many such stories to be told and shared from people in similar circumstances and I hope, some day, to hear some of these stories from her.

For now, it is for me just to share a coincidence of two stories that had a BBC Connect in their own special way.

–Mamata

 

A Celebration of Solitude

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I was introduced to Ruskin Bond over 30 years ago by Uncle Ken and Rusty. These were the characters in the first books that I translated. I so enjoyed the madcap adventures of the eccentric Uncle Ken and the restless school boy Rusty, not just for the stories but for the simple style of writing and the lovely use of language. As a translator it was a challenge to try to retain the spirit and the form in another language.

Following this introduction I continued to follow Ruskin Bond on his wanderings and meanderings through his essays and columns. Here was someone who was not only sensitive to, and entranced by every minute detail of nature, but one who could share this evocatively through words.

When Ruskin Bond’s autobiography was published just over a year ago, I was curious and eager to fill in the blanks and to know more about Ruskin the person. I recently read the book called Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography.  In it saw how many parts of his own life have been woven in his writings. Ruskin’s story is simply told and flows gently through eight decades, capturing flavours of the life of the angrez and the Anglo-Indians from the colonial times, through the Second World War, India’s partition and the birth and development of the new republic.

Ruskin writes about family and friends, travels and travails, painting word pictures that make one feel as if one is leafing through a real photo album. As he wrote “That’s what life is really like—episodic, full of highs and lows and some fairly dull troughs in between. Life is not a novel, it does not have the organisation of a novel. People are not characters in a play; they refuse to conform to the exigencies of a plot or a set of scenes. Some people become an integral part of our lives; others are ships that pass in the night. Short stories, in fact.”

For me there were “Eureka” moments when one recognized the people who became memorable characters in many of his stories. I marveled at the memory that could conjure up images from sixty-seventy years ago, but I also learnt the value of keeping a journal, something that Ruskin has done since his school days.

Above all, what the book reiterated was the celebration of solitude.  Ruskin Bond is not a recluse nor one who shuns human contact. As a boy he writes that he was lonely, “loneliness that was not of my seeking. The solitude I sought. And found.” This solitude he found in nature, nature is the companion that has sustained and energized him over eighty years, and with it, the magic of the words to share the joy with others.

“I’m like a lone fox dancingIMG_20190126_102042 (2).jpg

In the morning dew.”

–Mamata

 

 

Navigating a Book

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It has probably happened to all of us at some time. We read a book, and we love it. We urge our friends to read it, but when they do, they react to it in a very different way—find it unreadable even. I had always attributed this to different tastes. And then, sometimes a book by an author that I know and like just does not hold my attention, and I don’t quite ‘get into it’ as it were. I attribute this to my ‘mood’ or state of mind.

Interestingly, I recently came across a piece by the famous German author Herman Hesse that helps to explain why this happens. In an essay titled On Reading Books written in 1920, Hesse describes what could be called the ‘taxonomy’ of readers. He argues that just as people have different temperaments and attitudes towards anything in the world, these also affect our personality as readers. He outlines three key types of reader personalities, which can coexist within a single reader over the course of a lifetime.

The first type he calls the naive reader—“one who assumes that a book is there simply and solely to be read faithfully and attentively and who experiences a book merely as content.” Such a reader consumes a book as he consumes a loaf of bread, or sleeps because there is a bed.

The second type of reader is one “who is endowed with childlike wonderment, who sees past the superficialities of content to plumb the depths of the writer’s creative impulse. This reader treasures neither the substance nor the form of a book as its single most important value. He knows, in the way children know, that every object can have ten or a hundred meanings for the mind. For such a mind the bread becomes a mountain to bore tunnels into, and the bed a cave, a garden, a snow field.” This kind of reader may be described as an imaginative investigator.

Next comes the final type of reader, who is really a non-reader but rather a dreamer and interpreter: “He is so completely an individual, so very much himself, that he confronts his reading matter with complete freedom. He wishes neither to educate nor to entertain himself, he uses a book exactly like any other object in the world, for him it is simply a point of departure and a stimulus. Essentially it makes no difference to him what he reads. He does not need a philosopher in order to learn from him, to adopt his teaching, or to attack or criticize him. He does not read a poet to accept his interpretation of the world; he interprets it for himself. He is, if you like, completely a child. He plays with everything — and from one point of view there is nothing more fruitful and rewarding than to play with everything. If this reader finds a beautiful sentence in a book, a truth, a word of wisdom, he begins by experimentally turning it upside down.”

“This reader is able, or rather each one of us is able, at the hour in which he is at this stage, to read whatever he likes, a novel or grammar, a railroad timetable, a galley proof from the printer. At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height, we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading. They may come out of the text, they may simply emerge from the type face. An advertisement in a newspaper can become a revelation; the most exhilarating, the most affirmative thoughts can spring from a completely irrelevant word if one turns it about, playing with its letters as with a jigsaw puzzle. In this stage one can …play with the words, letters, and sounds, and thereby take a tour through the hundred kingdoms of knowledge, memory, and thought”.

Before we begin to analyse where we fit into this taxonomy, Hesse reminds us that “no one of us need belong permanently to any one of these types. Each mode of reading is necessary for a full life, but it is insufficient in and of itself.”

He goes on to urge “For just once in your life remain for an hour, a day at the third stage, the stage of not-reading-any-more. You will thereafter (it’s so easy to slip back) be that much better a reader, that much better a listener and interpreter of everything written.”

–Mamata

Moon Tiger

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“On the bedside is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil IMG_20181211_082936 (1).jpgthat burns slowly all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of green ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.”

When I read these words my eyes fell on the Good Knight coil by my bedside…and I looked at it with completely new eyes.  Imagine, this taken-for-granted necessity being described so eloquently. Even more interesting was the fact that this description refers to the period of the first World War II in Egypt when mosquito repellent coils were widely used and sold under the name of Moon Tiger. So much for my thinking that Good Knight was a very desi product of our times!

The revelation came as I was recently reading a book by the same name. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively was published in 1987 and won the Booker Prize that year.

Moon Tiger is the tale told by Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, once-famous writer of history books, who lies dying in hospital. As she lies there she is conjuring in her mind ‘a history of the world … and in the process, my own’. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times peopled with those near and dear to her. In doing so she confronts her own, personal history, unearthing the passions and pains that have defined her life.

The most poignant of these is her memories of her time in Egypt as a war correspondent and her brief affair with her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. The description of the Moon Tiger that burns all night, slowly dropping its coil into ash, forms both the central image of the story and its structure.

Penelope Lively, an acclaimed novelist and children’s writer was herself born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933 and brought up there. In this novel she weaves an ‘exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire’. Moon Tiger is also about the ways in which we are connected to people, places, and history.

I have always enjoyed reading Penelope Lively, but this book soars above them all in terms of the language, the flow and the sensitive journey through the landscape of the mind.  The title itself is ‘a metaphor for the persistence of some experiences and the burning present-ness of some memories’.

Coincidentally I discovered this book this year—2018—the same year that the Golden Man Booker list, which chose one book for each of the five decades that the Booker Prize has been running, announced that Moon Tiger was the chosen book for the decade of the 1980s.

–Mamata

Audio Books

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A recent article titled Human Library immediately grabbed my attention. Being always drawn to anything related to books and libraries I was curious to know what this was. Turns out that this was literally a library where people instead of books are issued out! I was intrigued—What, How and Why?

At a Human Library event, the “books” are people with special experiences; “readers” can choose from various “titles” and then “borrow” them. The procedure is similar to that of a regular library.  At the main desk there is a list of “books” available and each “reader” is given a Human Library card by one of the librarians. They then choose a “book”, sometimes with the help of an official matchmaker or library assistant. The reader and the book then move to a space where there are numerous tables and chairs; this is where a safe and respectful conversation begins, and lasts for up to half an hour. The “reader” reads the “book” by asking the “book” questions about their personal situation. The “book”, as well as answering pertinent questions, has the option not to answer and also to ask their own questions.

The most interesting aspect of this library is the choice of “books”. In keeping with its fundamental premise which is ‘to build a positive framework for conversations that can challenge stereotypes and prejudices through dialogue’, the Human Library encourages people to challenge their own preconceived notions—to truly get to know, and learn from, someone they might otherwise make a snap judgement about. As the website says “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Most of the stories that the “books” tell have to do with some kind of stereotype or stigmatized topic. For example in the Human Library UK  “The titles celebrate diversity and promote equality by deliberately acknowledging differences, lifestyles, ethnicities, faiths, disabilities, abilities and characteristics that may be stigmatised in the hope it might provoke an assumption or even prejudice in readers.”

While new to me, it turns out that the concept of human libraries is not that new. The Human Library is an international organization and movement that first started in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000. It was “a place where difficult questions are expected, appreciated and answered.” Its objective was to address people’s prejudices by helping them to talk to those they would not normally meet, and to initiate conversations between people of different orientations, backgrounds and religions, by urging participants to listen to each other’s life experiences.

It began with an event which was open eight hours a day for four days straight and featured over fifty different “titles”. More than a thousand readers took advantage leaving books, librarians, organisers and readers stunned at the impact of the Human Library.

Today the movement has become an international phenomenon with “libraries” in more than 70 countries. In India there are Human Libraries in several cities including Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and spreading.

What an amazing and inspiring movement! For me the term ‘audio books’ has acquired a unique human dimension.

–Mamata

 

Food Spy

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It is said that America is a country of immigrants. Over the centuries people from all continents made their way to the ‘promised land’ and made it their home. Interestingly, a lot of the food that is today so much a part of the American diet, is also part of another immigration story. Quinoa, kale, avocado, nectarines, soya beans; even pineapples, oranges and lemons—just about 150 years ago, these were unseen and unheard of in America. Many of these were introduced to the country by a single man, David Fairchild, who called himself an agricultural explorer.

David Fairchild grew up in Kansas at the end of the 19th century, a time when the diet of his countrymen was made up primarily of bland meat, potatoes and cheese, and excluded vegetables and fruit. Fairchild was no gourmet himself, but he loved plants, and he loved travel, and he found a way to combine both into a job for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the age of 22, he created the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction of the USDA, and for the next 37 years, he travelled the world, visiting every continent except Antarctica, in search of useful plants to bring back to America. When he started out in his new job, with little knowledge or knowhow, he began by stealing seeds, but over time he learnt other strategies like talking to the local people, visiting local markets and observing what people were growing and eating. This also earned him the sobriquet of Food Spy!

With a combination of strategies, and often at the risk of his own life, Fairchild managed to send back seeds or cuttings of over 200,000 kinds of fruits, vegetable and grains. His department, the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, researched these and distributed new crops to farmers around the states.

It was not an easy process, introducing new food crops. Farmers did not like to take risks, the general public was suspicious of new foods and fearful that the overseas immigrants would bring in tropical disease and insects. Even today there is a Quarantine Law which forbids anyone from bringing in agricultural material into the US. Uphill task though it was, Fairchild did succeed to a large extent, and managed to introduce mangoes, quinoa, dates, cotton, soybeans, bamboo, and even the flowering Japanese cherry trees that blossom all over Washington D.C. each spring.

In 1904 Fairchild was invited to speak at the National Geographic Society where he met the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell who was the Society’s second president; years later Fairchild married Bell’s daughter.

Last week the National Geographic Society hosted a curated dinner where the menu featured some of the many foods—avocados, dates, and other that David Fairchild brought to the United States more than 100 years ago, thus changing the country’s culinary palate.

The story of this amazing food traveller is told in a book by Daniel Stone titled The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats.

 —Mamata

 

Nom de Plume

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My library has recently acquired the complete set of Agatha Christie novels in attractive new editions. They take up two long shelves and I was immediately drawn to them. As with most of my generation, Agatha Christie was a must read. We were intrigued and impressed by the eccentricities and grey cells of Hercule Poirot and the genteel but no-nonsense sharp mind of Miss Jane Marple.

Agatha Christie, the Queen of murder mysteries, outsold, it is said, only by the Bible and Shakespeare! The best-selling novelist of all time with her 66 detective novels and the world’s longest-running play The Mousetrap.

While I was browsing the shelves, I also saw books by the name Mary Westmacott alongside. And it is these that I decided to explore. These are the books that Agatha Christie wrote under the pen name or pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Why a pen name? Explaining this in a piece written for her centenary celebrations in 1990, Christie’s daughter wrote “As early as 1930, my mother wrote her first novel using the name Mary Westmacott. These novels, six in all, were a complete departure from the usual sphere of Agatha Christie Queen of Crime.” The novels explored human psychology and emotions and relationships that intrigued her, in a genre that was totally different from her murder mysteries, and writing under a different name freed her from the expectations of her mystery fans.

How did she choose the name? It seems that Mary was Agatha’s second name and Westmacott the name of some distant relatives. She succeeded in keeping her identity as Mary Westmacott unknown for nearly twenty years and the books, much to her pleasure, were modestly successful.

I have so far read two of her six Westmacott novels and am enjoying the language, style and substance greatly. They so sensitively capture what seem to be very contemporary intricacies of human psyches and complexities of relationships, even though they were written in the period of 1930s and 1940s. One of these, Absent in the Spring, was published in 1944. About this book Agatha/Mary wrote: “I wrote that book in three days flat…I went straight through…I don’t think I have ever been so tired…I didn’t want to change a word and although I don’t know myself of course what it is really like, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy and author can have.”

Using a nom de plume has been common throughout the history of literature. Authors have adopted pseudonyms for different reasons. Some to make their voice heard under authoritarian regimes; some to break the mould of what their readers expect from them, and, in some cases, women have used masculine noms de plume during times when men had an easier time getting published. While the phrase nom de plume means “pen name” in French, it doesn’t come from French speakers, but was coined in English, using French words.

An antithesis of Agatha Christie is JK Rowling, who after her huge success as the creator of Harry Potter, moved from Muggles and Magic, to murder and detective Cormoran, under the name Robert Galbraith. Her intention in taking on the nom de plume was for her crime fiction books to be judged on their own merit.

As for me, Christie or Rowling, by any other name, are favourite reads all the same!

–Mamata