Hindustan Times
High Shelf Esteem
I’m in love. I mean it. Ranjit Lal, will you marry me?
Okay, okay, I take that back. All the man has ever done is make me happy, so I don’t want to send him screaming into the night. So here’s a new proposal. Ranjit Lal, will you write more and more and more books that put a big grin on my face and make me enjoy the world?
This sounds as though I’ve only just discovered Ranjit Lal, but that’s not entirely true. I’d read birding / nature pieces by him here and there. And years ago, I had reviewed The Caterpillar Who Went On a Diet and Other Stories for a children’s books special on the reviews page. That was when I first realised that Ranjit Lal writes books, and since then I’ve been looking out for them.
Over the last couple of years, I managed to get The Crow Chronicles, Wild City: Nature Wonders Next Door, The Simians of South Block and the Yumyum Piglets, all of which I loved. But I knew he’d written more books and it was extremely frustrating to realise that the only way I’d get them would be if I stumbled upon them. Unfortunately, book distribution in India seems to be random at best. And books published in India seem only to be available at the time of publication. One year later, they’ve vanished completely.
Then, a couple of weeks ago at Landmark, I found a very battered copy of Mostly Birds, Some Monkeys and a Pest: Nature in and Around Delhi, which I snatched up feverishly and rushed home and read at once. It’s brilliant. But it made me more frustrated than ever. I knew he’d written more books, but would I ever be able to get them?
Which was when I had a brilliant idea. I got on to Flipkart.com and found practically all the books written by Ranjit Lal. Which I ordered at ONCE, and have received. And now I’ve finished two of his Bossman stories (Bossman being an bulldog owned by four children who are constantly in and out of adventures), have just begun to read The Small Tigers of Shergarh and The Life and Times of Altu-faltu and The Battle for No. 19 are on my bedside table, waiting to be read.
I am a happy, happy person.
What I love about Ranjit Lal’s books is, whether they’re fiction or non-fiction, for older readers or the young, they are always cheerful. Not that they are escapist – The Battle for No. 19, for instance, deals with the experiences of a bunch of kids trapped in a house during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots; The Small Tigers of Shergarh is about the adventures of two children very recently orphaned in a car accident; The Crow Chronicles and The Simians of South Block… are satire, dealing with the bane of most of the middle class – politics and politicians. But Lal has a light touch and super powers of observation. There’s always something to make the reader grin. He seems to delight in the world and that makes the reader delighted too.
Go get.
And Flipkart, zindabad!
Btw, here’s a shameless plug.
My sister Rupa Gulab’s latest book, The Great Depression of the ’40s , is now available. Here’s the blurb:
“At forty-three Mantra decides to quit her job to experience the pleasure of retirement while she’s still able to walk without a nursing attendant in tow. But to her horror, she has to smooth the wrinkles in her marriage before she can get to work on the ones on her face. As her husband’s cholesterol begins to shoot dangerously high, Mantra’s libido hits rock bottom. She has to do something ASAP or she’ll spend the rest of her life as an ageing, frigid divorcee.
“To make matters worse, Mantra also has to caution her sister-in-law Anjali about the ghost of a boyfriend past, counsel her page 3-wannabe neighbour on how to make it to page 3 and figure out how to win over her surly cook.”
I think it’s rather funny.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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You sure are an ardent fan !!
kushal Reply:
May 28th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Hahaha! So sorry to have frightened you, Fazil, but what can I say except that I LOVE his writing?
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