Tejimola : A Story
Tejimola is an Assamese folktale with the standard motifs of a step-mother and a troubled daughter, which was first published in 1911, by the renowned Assamese author Lakshminath Bezbarua, and since then has been a part of the Assamese folklore. Once upon a time, there lived a merchant who had a beautiful daughter called Tejimola. […]
Ep. 27: The Indian Banking Story with Madan Sabnavis
Do you often wonder— ‘Is my money safe in banks?’ India is grappling with its worst banking crisis ever, and we are still trying to figure out what landed us here. This podcast episode with economist Madan Sabnavis analyses the role of the government and RBI in allowing the problem to reach the dimension it […]
The Two Storks : A Story
An interesting folktale, The Two Storks, prevalent in the Sindh province of Pakistan, sends a very interesting moral message. According to this story, in a tamarind tree beside a lake, a stork and a she-stork made a nest and had babies. Early every morning both of them flew out in search of food to feed […]
Ep. 26: The Climate Story with Rajat Chaudhuri
In this episode of India Booked, host Ayushi Mona talks to Rajat Chaudhuri about ‘The Butterfly Effect‘, on how his work as a climate activist is reflected in his fiction, the necessity of “enveloping scientific ideas in a story” to make it more accessible, the interconnected roles of technology, politics, public health and the environment, […]
Ep. 25: Waiting for the Dust to Settle with Veio Pou
In this episode of India Booked, host Ayushi Mona talks to Veio Pou, about his brilliant new debut novel, Waiting for the Dust to Settle, published by Speaking Tiger Books. Set in Manipur, Waiting for the Dust to Settle is a moving novel about the human cost of the violence that the Naga. Mona and […]
Short Story Collections – October 2020
Short Story Thursday is a weekly series dedicated to highlighting the short-stories from Indian literature. In October, we focused on the themes like Mental Health Awareness, Women in Writing, TeenTober and Halloween. Often, in the most conventional things and situations we find strangeness, realities, depth and familiarity. ‘This Is How It Took Place‘ written by […]
Bullet Baba: A Story
There is a saying that it takes all sorts to make the world and the story I am about to tell you proves this. About 50 kilometers from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, on the highway to Pali, near Chotila village, one comes across a deity called Bullet Baba. On a raised platform, a Royal Enfield Bullet 350 […]
Prince Five-Weapons: A story
The Jataka Tales are a voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of Gautama Buddha in both human and animal form. The Jatakas are amongst the earliest Buddhist literature, to around the 4th century BCE. Many often have interesting morals or messages, such as this one. Once a young prince completed his training under a renowned teacher […]
Kotrabaina Ramela
The epics have been a major influence across communities and tribes in India. In the folk oral epics of Central India, especially in Chattisgarh and Western Odisha, we find many influences. Bansgeet (song of the bamboo) is one such folk-epic, which is common among the Gaur (milkmen) community of Kalahandi, Odisha. Bans, or the bamboo, is a […]
The tale of a story and a song
‘A Story and a Song’ is a translated tale from Kannada and included in the collection ‘A Flowering Tree’ by A.K. Ramanujan. . The world is all about stories and storytelling. Imagine a world which had no stories. Imagine a childhood, in which there was no dadima-ki-kahaniyaan, no Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella […]
